Fungal laccase enzyme applications in bioremediation of polluted wastewater

Abstract

Environmental pollution had emerged by the beginning of urban life and increased parallel to the industrial development. Chemicals are being produced and used largely in the branches of mainly textile industry with today’s technology such as leather tanning, paper industry, food technologies, agricultural investigations, hair dyes, and many other branches, mainly the field of cosmetics. Various amounts of pollutants found in the wastewaters are the chemicals that cause color pollution in waters. In addition, they threaten the photosynthetic activity of the life in water and are also hardly decomposed. The classical methods used in the treatment (refinement) of wastewater (classical precipitation, ion exchange, ozone treatment, coagulation, flocculation, adsorption, etc.) are far from being practical and economical because of their investment and management costs and also reemergence of new pollutants after a certain period. The ability of laccase enzyme to oxidize many different forms of substrates made them to be used in different industrial and biotechnological applications as biocatalysts. Laccase activity and occurrence of laccases in fungus species were demonstrated in these studies. In addition, determination of the expression levels of the gene coding for laccase enzyme which is thought be very important in defense against oxidative stress will give information about the mechanism of the enzyme and will illuminate the development of the production of laccase-based methods. This result is going to form a major step for the studies that will provide the fungus species to be used as biosorption agents for the detoxification purposes of the wastes mainly of textile and petrochemical industries.