Enzyme immobilization as a sustainable approach toward ecological remediation of organic-contaminated soils: Advances, issues, and future perspectives

Abstract

Removing recalcitrant organic contaminants from the soil via sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies are essential for environment and human health. Microbial enzyme is a promising biocatalyst, particularly in environmental bioremediation. To improve their stability and catalytic ability, enzymes are often immobilized on supporting materials. Nevertheless, the most appropriate immobilization technology and supporting materials must be selected in advance to achieve high eco-remediation efficiency. This review highlighted the recent advances and provided the future perspectives of immobilization techniques and supporting materials, with particular attention on ensuring basic features and possibilities of immobilized enzymes for eco-remediation of organic contaminated soil. The bioavailability, biodegradability and high cost of immobilized carriers have limited their industrial application and commercialization in remediation of organic contaminated soil, which was hereby thoroughly reviewed. Finally, future directions, including minimizing enzyme production costs, inexpensive and scalable immobilization carriers, and methods, were highlighted to offer new perspectives on the eco-remediation of organic contaminated soil.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Immobilized approaches and carriers were classified and introduced.

• Immobilized enzymes have tremendous potential in soil eco-remediation.

• The main mechanism for soil remediation is the presence of a suitable microenvironment.

• Bioavailability, high cost and accessibility limited the large-scale applications.

• Future directions for soil eco-remediation with enzyme immobilization were proposed.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Keywords:

• Eco-remediation
• enzyme immobilization
• immobilization technology
• organic contaminants
• soil remediation
• supporting materials

HANDLING EDITORS:

• Frederic Coulon and Lena Q. Ma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial supports by the National Key R & D Program of the Science and Technology of China (2020YFC1808801), Beijing Postdoctoral Research Foundation (2022ZZ124), and the Fundamental Research Funds for Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture (X22017).