Abstract :

: Environmental pollutants are a significant threat to ecosystems, when these substances deposited at trace levels over time and accumulate in soil, water, and air, impacting all life. Bioremediation is an eco-friendly sustainable environmental management strategy that uses biological agents as direct means to sequester, convert, degrade or remove pollutants. Mycoremediation is a type of bioremediation using fungi-based methods that use either fungi or their extracellular enzymes (amylases, cellulases, laccases, proteases, lipases, and peroxidases), to detoxify many pollutants. Specifically, fungi are effective at targeting heavy metals, synthetic dyes, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and domestic waste, converting them to less toxic or useful byproducts. Fungi can tolerate high levels of heavy metals and have a wide range of metabolic capabilities, allowing them to perform biosorption, bioaugmentation, biomineralization, detoxification, precipitation, oxidation, and reduction with little effort and no complicated systems. Fungi can help mitigate the effects of cadmium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cobalt, iron, and zinc, which can disrupt normal metabolism and induce mutations by utilizing their cellular systems and enzymes for remediation. Fungal enzymes are also used in numerous industries including textiles, food processing, pesticides and wastewater treatment to remove metals and other environmental pollutants before they are released into the environment. Increasingly, fungi are demonstrating a tremendous amount of potential as eco-friendly agents for pollutant management, thereby contributing to the development of cleaner, more sustainable ecosystems through scalable, cost-effective mycoremediation methods.