Elsevier

Chemosphere

Volume 307, Part 3, November 2022, 136035
Chemosphere

Peroxidases-based enticing biotechnological platforms for biodegradation and biotransformation of emerging contaminants

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.136035Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Emerging contaminants are widely detected in surface and drinking water.

  • Sources, biocatalytic attributes, and oxidative mechanisms of microbial peroxidases.

  • Potential of peroxidases-H2O2 system for environmental cleanup.

  • Microbial peroxidases-based platforms for emerging contaminants degradation.

Abstract

Rampant industrial boom, urbanization, and exponential population growth resulted in widespread environmental pollution, with water being one of the leading affected resources. All kinds of pollutants, including phenols, industrial dyes, antibiotics, pharmaceutically active residues, and persistent/volatile organic compounds, have a paramount effect, either directly or indirectly, on human health and aquatic entities. Strategies for affordable and efficient decontamination of these emerging pollutants have become the prime focus of academic researchers, industry, and government to constitute a sustainable human society. Classical treatment techniques for environmental contaminants are associated with several limitations, such as inefficiency, complex pretreatments, overall high process cost, high sludge generation, and highly toxic side-products formation. Enzymatic remediation is considered a green and ecologically friendlier method that holds considerable potential to mitigate any kinds of contaminating agents. Exploiting the potential of various peroxidases for pollution abatement is an emerging research area and has considerable advantages, such as efficiency and ease of handling, over other methods. This work is designed to provide recent progress in deploying peroxidases as green and versatile biocatalytic tools for the degradation and transformation of a spectrum of potentially hazardous environmental pollutants to broaden their scope for biotechnological and environmental purposes. More studies are required to explicate the degradation mechanisms, assess the toxicology levels of bio-transformed metabolites, and standardize the treatment strategies for economic viability.

Introduction

Rapid industrial proliferation and exponential population growth have resulted in the generation and dumping of a large spectrum of hazardous organic contaminants, including hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pesticides, radionuclides, dyes, phenazines, and heavy metals into the environment (Hassan et al., 2021; Ahsan et al., 2021; Qian et al., 2021; Zhen et al., 2021). Various industries, i.e., dye and chemical manufacturing, petrochemical refining, pharmaceutical, and textile processing units, are the sources of these contaminants (Fig. 1). The continuous release of these harmful pollutants into water, soil, and air matrices without suitable treatment is causing negative impacts on human health and deteriorating the surrounding environmental equilibrium (Munir et al., 2022; Bilal et al., 2022a, Bilal et al., 2022b; Rizwan et al., 2022). Therefore, it has become a serious concern to eradicate these contaminants via sustainable routes for protecting the receiving environment (Lin et al., 2022; Sandhya et al., 2022).

Conventional wastewater treatment methods are not configured to adequately treat and eliminate pollutants from the environment (Dzumbira et al., 2021; Khan et al., 2022). Although adsorption, chemical oxidation, electrocoagulation, and anaerobic process have been applied to reduce the impact of emerging pollutants, these methods are often ineffective, mostly at small concentrations, generating toxic by-products or the construction and operational costs render implementation not feasible (Khan et al., 2021; Muhammad et al., 2021; Ali et al., 2022).

Biological approaches have emerged as cost-effective and viable alternatives for the decontamination and treatment of industrial wastewater (Ahmad et al., 2022; Bilal et al., 2022a, Bilal et al., 2022b; de Jesus et al., 2022). Biological means implicate the exploitation of fungi, bacteria, algae, and enzyme biocatalysts to degrade hazardous compounds through anaerobic, aerobic, or processes combining both (Zhao et al., 2017a,b; Speight, 2017; Pande et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022). Compared to the physiochemical methods, bioremediation exhibits desired benefits like low cost, environmentally friendly, energy efficient, and applicability to treat very low concentrations of contaminants. However, biological treatment generally require longer time periods, and adverse environmental conditions may limit the growth and activity of microorganisms (Liu et al., 2019; Bhatt et al., 2022a,b).

The bio-mitigation approach that exploits the potential of various peroxidases for pollution abatement is a comparatively emerging research area and has considerable advantages from an efficient catalysis perspective, such as efficiency and ease of handling, over other methods (Al-Maqdi et al., 2021a,b). Enzymatic remediation is considered a green and ecologically friendlier method that possesses an extraordinary potential to mitigate any environmental contaminant in a controllable, specific, and easy to monitor way (Kumar et al., 2021; Rafeeq et al., 2022). Furthermore, enzyme-mediated biocatalytic transformation eradicates the generation of undesired by-products than microbial and chemical remediation. Therefore, enzyme-based remediation technique opens new horizons to treat wastewater by fulfilling ecological and sustainable developmental goals. Amid different enzymes, peroxidases exhibit the immense capability of catalyzing the oxidative degradation of a spectrum of chemical compounds utilizing H2O2 as a co-substrate (Pradeep et al., 2015). Consequently, these biocatalysts have received increasing industrial applications in numerous technological bioprocesses, like biosensor development, bioremediation, polymerization of phenolic compounds, and removal of synthetic dye pollutants from textile industries (da Silva Vilar et al., 2021; Sellami et al., 2021; Singh et al., 2021; Bilal et al., 2017a, 2017b).

Notwithstanding the peroxidase's effectiveness, the major rationale for the lack of enzyme-mediated bioremediation implementation on an industrial level is the lack of recycling, reusability, and elevated costs of the purified enzymes (Al-Maqdi et al., 2021a; Zdarta et al., 2022). Enzyme immobilization is a straightforward way to address some of these inadequacies because the immobilized derivatives can be retrieved after the degradation cycle and reprocessed in the succeeding batches. Many studies have documented that the immobilization process can also augment the enzyme's catalytic activity, thermal tolerance, and substrate specificity (Shaheen et al., 2017; Bilal and Iqbal, 2020; Tan et al., 2021). Insolubilization has a set of advantageous attributes, such as high stability, incessant utilization, minimal reaction duration, better processing control, prospects of multi-enzyme system, facile product recovery, and environmental responsiveness.

Since there is a high demand to develop effective technologies for pollutants removal, eco-friendly and novel methods for enzyme immobilization for the abatement of “emerging pollutants of serious concern” are of particular interest. Moreover, the lack of literature reports and application data related to the deployment of peroxidases-mediated removal of different classes of emerging pollutants further substantiates the uniqueness of the present challenge. This work is designed to provide recent progress in deploying peroxidases as a green and versatile biocatalytic tool for the degradation and transformation of a wide range of potentially hazardous environmental pollutants to broaden their scope in biotechnological and environmental purposes.

Section snippets

Peroxidases― sources, biocatalytic attributes, and oxidative mechanisms

Peroxidases (EC 1.11.1. X) are categorized into heme and non-heme-containing enzymes. Based on the PeroxiBase database, 74% of the peroxidase protein sequences were recognized to be heme peroxidases, which are primarily found in bacteria, fungi, animals, and plants. Moreover, 87% of known heme peroxidases have been determined as non-animal origin. Based on sequence similarities, non-animal peroxidases are classified I, II, and III (Passardi et al., 2007a). Class I encompasses yeast cytochrome c

Role of the peroxidases-H2O2 system for environmental cleanup

Hydrogen peroxide is widely applied as a bio-decontaminant, anti-infection, and sterilizing agent, which are important in pharmaceutical production and the food industry (Chen et al., 2013). It is also involved in numerous bioprocesses and plays a crucial role in intracellular pathways and transducing defense signals in plants (Apostol et al., 1989). Importantly, H2O2 also contributes to the peroxidases-mediated catalytic reactions and mediator and oxidizing agent for the enzymatic

Removal of industrial dyes

Colored organic compounds are widely applied to color photography, paper printing, textile processing, and additives in petroleum-related products. Nevertheless, these recalcitrant aromatic structures may deteriorate water quality and aquatic surfaces. Synthetic dyes are complicated and hazardous compounds that constitute a grave risk to public health and surrounding environments. Various chemical or physical treatment methods have been attempted for dye exclusion, but these processes suffer

Conclusions

Based on extensive literature evaluation, this work highlights the significant importance of the peroxidase-based enzymatic approach in mitigating all kinds of contaminating agents in wastewater/industrial effluent, including phenols, industrial dyes, antibiotics, pharmaceutically active residues, and persistent/volatile organic compounds that have a paramount effect, on human health and aquatic entities. Exploiting the potential of various peroxidases for pollution abatement appears to be a

Author's contributions

JianSong Gan, Muhammad Bilal: Conceptualization, Data analysis and curation, Validation, Writing - original draft, review & editing. XiaoBing Li, Syed Zakir Hussain Shah, Methodology, Data analysis and curation, Validation, Writing - review & editing. Badr A. Mohamed, Tony Hadibarata: Software, Graphics, Validation, Visualization, Writing - review and editing. Muhammad Bilal, Hairong Cheng: Supervision, Project administration, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing -

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

The National Key Research and Development Program of China [2018YFA0900700] supported this work.

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