Designing synthetic microbial communities for effectual bioremediation: A review

Abstract

Bioremediation is a better alternative and widely accepted approach used for efficient degradation of environmental pollutants released from industries, urban and agricultural activities due to its eco-friendly nature. Systems biology helps in the identification of new genes, proteins, metabolites, and metabolic pathways involved in bioremediation. Such information can be used for designing synthetic microbial communities that can degrade multiple recalcitrant pollutants simultaneously. This review gives a brief insight into various systems biology tools towards providing a greater understanding of microbial behaviour and improving the way of bioremediation. These techniques alone or in combination, provide a way to understand and improve the genetic potential of microorganisms to remediate various environmental contaminants efficiently. Further, this review also describes the successful employment of synthetic microbial consortium in the bioremediation. Moreover, In-silico tools are also described to analyse the data obtained through different laboratory experiments as well to predict the behaviour of microbial consortium towards the pollutants using different databases.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Bioremediation
• systems biology
• synthetic microbial consortium
• in-silico tools

Acknowledgment

BS acknowledges the support in the form of a University Research Scholarship by M. D. University, Rohtak, India.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Authors duly acknowledge the infrastructural support from the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, Govt. of India, through FIST grant [Grant No. 1196 SR/FST/LS-I/2017/4] and Department of Biotechnology, Government of India [Grant no. BT/PR27437/BCE/8/1433/2018].