Bioremediation Essay

Water pollution is one of the main problems of today’s society. Inorganic and organic contaminants release from various industries represents a serious threat to environment due to their accumulation throughout the food chain. Human as final consumer is more sensitive to such pollutants, since biomagnifications of contaminants occurs at each successive trophic level. Conventionally used methods became expensive and require aggressive conditions that may lead to generate secondary pollutants. Therefore, worldwide there is a continuous interest in development of new, effective and inexpensive techniques for the removal of pollutants. Among them bioremediation have been broadly studied.

Bioremediation involves “clean-up of pollution from air, surface water, groundwater and soil, using biological processes,

Although algae have been historically used for the domestic wastewater treatment especially for nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen removal, phycoremediation is relatively a new term used for abatement of contaminated sites by algae and their potential for wastewater treatment is however much wider in scope than its current role.

Recently, various techniques are being developed to make the process more efficient through immobilization and transgenesis of algae. Immobilization of microalgae, as part of a global trend of immobilizing microbial cells in an assortment of matrices has a wide scope in biotechnological applications. Transgenesis in algae is a complex and fast-growing technology.

The present work will focus on significant role and potential of algae in pollutants removal from the wastewater and gives a brief review of recent development in the field of phycoremediation.

2. Heavy Metals Removal

Indiscriminate industrial and domestic wastes disposal often cause the flows of heavy metal into the natural water bodies. These activities have adverse impact on living forms as some metal