ABSTRACT
Environmental pollution has become one of the serious problems for the industrialized world, contaminating food, water and soil. These pollutants are highly toxic and are persistent in the ecosystem. Conventionally, pollutants are treated by chemical and physical methods, which do not result in complete removal of pollutants from the environment. Hence, remediation of pollution using biological sources, also known as bioremediation, is a highly promising technique to mitigate environmental pollution. One of the techniques of bioremediation is the use of biosurfactants. Biosurfactants are high molecular weight amphiphilic molecules that consist of both hydrophilic and hydrophobic entities. Marine biosurfactants are highly stable under extreme conditions of temperature, pH and salinity and hence have a wide range of applications in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food industries as well as in environmental bioremediation. Biosurfactants improve the efficiency of bioremediation by increasing the bioavailability of pollutants and have been used in bioremediation of oil spills, degradation of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, removal of heavy metals and microbial-enhanced oil recovery. This chapter discusses the role of marine biosurfactants in bioremediation of environmental pollution. The various techniques of bioremediation are also discussed in brief.
