Bioremediation: an overview on current practices, advances, and new perspectives in environmental pollution treatment

[Excerpt] Environmental pollution generated the need to search for new environmentally friendly, low-cost, and more efficient environmental clean-up techniques for its removal or reduction. Bioremediation, a branch of environmental biotechnology, is nowadays considered as one of the most promising alternatives. This technology uses the amazing ability of microorganisms or plants to accumulate, detoxify, degrade, or remove environmental contaminants. Bioremediation provides the transformation and/or even removal of organic and inorganic pollutants, even when they are present at low concentration. Continuous efforts are still made to understand the mechanisms by which microorganisms and plants remove or transform environmental pollutants. Thus, the purpose of this special issue was to explore different visions on bioremediation, while addressing recent advances and new ideas in the perspective of efficient process scale-up in view of application at larger scales. Authors’ contributions cover various topics with a range of papers including original research and review articles spanning studies in remediation of different environments which outline new findings in the biotechnology field. This special issue contains five papers including one review article and four original research articles. A brief description of these five manuscripts is detailed below. [...]We would like to extend our gratitude to all the authors who submitted their work for consideration in our special issue and to reviewers for their critical feedback. Contributions of Raluca Maria Hlihor and Maria Gavrilescu to this special issue were supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research,CNCS-UEFISCDI (Project no. PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0683, Contract no. 65/2017). Teresa Tavares’ contribution is supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the research project PTDC/AAG-TEC/5269/2014, the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684), and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of NORTE 2020 (Programa Operacional Regional do Norte).