Biofilm-Associated Metal Bioremediation

One of the biggest challenges to the developing societies is metal pollution, especially in the regions of mining and plating that is affecting people worldwide. The use of conventional strategies in removing the waste is expensive and generates a large amount of toxic wastes, thereby affecting the environment adversely. This has resulted in the drift from the normal strategies to the use of eco-friendly strategies for the removal of metallic wastes being present within the soil. This technique of remediation uses the microbial organisms or microbial biomass that helps in detoxifying the soil from the toxic effects of inorganic metallic salts and heavy metals. Microbial biomass mainly comprises of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) which increases the efficiency of metal sequestering for the purpose of field bioremediation. The EPS is released by the microbial cells for the purpose of self-defense which mainly occurs during various environmental stresses such as starvation, temperature, pH, and other physiological or rheological stress conditions. It contains a large amount of anionic charge hence it causes large sequestering of metallic ions. Thus this chapter will focus on the biofilm-associated bioremediation of heavy metals, and the mechanism which is helping the process to occur.