Biofilm mediated strategies to mitigate heavy metal pollution: A critical review in metal bioremediation

Abstract Mining and various industrial activities, along with generation and accumulation of heavy metals due to agricultural and domestic activities are languishing human health and the environment as a whole. Employment of conventional strategies in eradicating these toxic loads, are way expensive and concerned with the production of secondary wastes. Biofilm being a syntropic microbial consortium, through the mechanism of cell communication and signaling, quorum sensing and modulating strategies accomplish the removal of contaminant metals from environment. Such biofilm mediated bioremediation may be explicitly explained by implementing synthetic biology models and through unique mathematical modelling of mechanisms of multi species biofilm formation and survival strategies in toxic environments. Microbial metabolism for extracellular electron transfer (EET) and development of niche-specific microbial electrochemistry-driven biotechnologies, exploit the bio electrochemical system of electroactive biofilms (EABs) for removal of metal ions from environment. The multi omics platform predicts the pathways of modified metal-biofilm interaction and sequestration strategies as crucial mechanism to accelerate biofilm mediated bioremediation processes.