ABSTRACT
With the development of the Industrial Age and the rapid rise in world population over the last century, societies have allowed unchecked release of large amounts of varied contaminants into different environmental compartments, thus posing signi—cant consequences for human health, biodiversity, and ecosystem stability (Gerhardt et al. 2009; Nordberg 2009). Therefore, during the last few decades, global exploration of sustainable solutions to a myriad of rapidly mounting environmental issues globally has been the major subject of environmental pollution research and of that regarding potential solutions. From this perspective, the strategic use of plants and their associated microbes to exclude, accumulate, immobilize, metabolize, or degrade varied environmental contaminants-collectively called phytotechnology-is contributing signi—cantly to the fate of varied environmental contaminants and to ef—ciently and sustainably decontaminating the biosphere from unwanted hazardous compounds. Although the use of plants and associated microbes for contaminant remediation dates back to the Roman Empire, the concept of phytoremediation was born in the 1980s out of the extraordinary ability that some plant species display in accumulating high quantities of toxic metals in their tissues or organs (Jez 2011; Maestri and Marmiroli 2011). Over the years, the term phytoremediation began being used in the scienti—c literature, starting in 1993 (Cunningham and Berti 1993; Raskin et al. 1994; Salt et al. 1995). In subsequent years, the de—nition evolved into phytotechnologies (Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council 2001), meaning a wide range of technologies applied successfully to remediate pollutants through a number of signi—cant strategies, such as stabilization; volatilization; metabolism, including degradation at the level of the rhizosphere; accumulation; and sequestration (McCutcheon and Schnoor 2003; Maestri and Marmiroli 2011) (Figure 1.1). Moreover, phytotechnologies, in fact, are essentially a form of ecological engineering, capitalizing on naturally occurring relationships among plants, microorganisms, and their environment. Additionally, as phytotechnologies employ human initiative to enhance natural plantand associated microorganism-assisted solutions to varied environmental problems, they represent a technology that is intermediate between engineering and natural attenuation (McCutcheon and Schnoor 2003; Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council 2009; Prasad et al. 2010).
