The quality of life on Earth is linked inextricably to the overall quality of the environment. In response to growing pressures on air, water, and land resources, global attention has focused in recent years on finding new ways to sustain and manage the environment. Biotechnology is an essential tool in this endeavor because it can provide new approaches for understanding, managing, preserving, and restoring the environment.Biotechnology can be used to assess the well being of ecosystems, transform pollutants into benign substances, generate biodegradable materials from renewable sources, and develop environmentally safe manufacturing and disposal processes. Researchers are just beginning to explore biotechnological approaches to problem solving in many areas of environmental management and quality assurance, such as:
Earth is a place for eventual evolution of macroscopic life. They have a wide taxonomic distribution and comprise of protozoa, algae, fungi, bacteria and viruses. Environmental biotechnology is not a new field; composing and wastewater treatment technologies are familiar examples of "old" environmental biotechnologies. However, recent developments in molecular biology, ecology, and environmental engineering now offer opportunities to modify organisms so that their basic biological processes are more efficient and can degrade more complex chemicals and higher volumes of waste materials.
Bioremediation is the use of microorganisms to decrease, eliminate, or contain hazardous and/or radioactive wastes to environmentally safe levels. While bioremediation of organic contaminants involves their transformation to benign products such as carbon dioxide, bioremediation of metals and radionuclides involves their removal from the aqueous phase to reduce risk to humans and the environment. Microorganisms can directly transform metals and radionuclides by changing their oxidation state to a reduced form that leads to in situ immobilization.
Currently, the fundamental knowledge that would allow the cost-effective deployment of in situ subsurface bioremediation of metals and radionuclides is lacking. Research on in situ bioremediation of metals and radionuclides has received less attention than research on solvents, fuels, and other organic contaminants; however, successful in situ applications of bioremediation of petroleum products and chlorinated solvents provide experience from which scientists can draw.