Bioaugmentation and biostimulation: a potential strategy for environmental remediation

Abstract

As the world is heading towards rapid urbanization and technological advancements, more undesirable and unwanted activities by human is raising major environmental issues like global warming, imbalance in soil ecological processes leading to lower agricultural yield, drastic climate change, etc. Predominantly, among all, xenobiotic recalcitrant compounds are indiscriminately being disposed in the environment causing significant hazard owing to its high stability and complexity. However, there are several methods for disposing such materials but the most efficient and significant disposal strategy is said to be bioremediation. This biological approach of remediation can be executed through introduction of efficient microbial strains (bioaugmentation) or by addition of rate limiting nutrients to the soil (biostimulation) to enhance the remediation process significantly. Existing literatures provide a broad landscape of the efficiency of some of the microbial strains and a few of the rate limiting nutrients in remediation of the toxic, highly complex and resistant contaminants but lacks information regarding their degree of efficiency and eco-friendliness in comparison with those of other disposal strategies. This review extensively focuses on a comparative discussion on different strategies of bioremediation to remediate the environment from the toxic, hazardous waste with the goal of building a less-toxic, stable and a healthy environment.