Chapter 15
Biohybrids for Environmental
Remediation and Biosensing
Concept, Synthesis and Future
Prospective
Archana Mishra,1,2,* Ayushi Rastogi 3 and
Avanish Singh Parmar4
15.1 Introduction
There is constant release of a wide range of pollutants (heavy metals, pesticides, etc.,) into water
bodies which leads to pollution of water resources. Water pollution is a serious concern as it causes
scarcity of drinking water worldwide. Organic as well as metal pollutants present in water bodies
are harmful to all living systems and environment. Several processes such as adsorption (Douglas
et al. 2016), biodegradation (Li et al. 2016), coagulation (Zhu et al. 2016) and photocatalytic oxidation
(Chong et al. 2010) have been used for the removal of pollutants and efficient wastewater treatment,
however; these have their own limitations, like generation of waste products, poor removal capacity,
high energy demand and high cost.
Microorganisms are well known for wastewater treatment as these degrade a variety of
substrates for their consumption using their metabolic diversity. A wide range of microorganism
like Aspergillus niger (Vassilev et al. 1997), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Shukla et al. 2014) and
Rhodopseudomonas sphaeroides (Liu et al. 2015) has been used for wastewater treatment. However,
limitations like slow biodegradation processes, difficulty in recovering cells, sensitivity towards the
surrounding environment and poor activities of recovered cells persist. There is an urgent need
to find economical cost-effective solutions for remediation of these pollutants. The combination
of the microorganism with suitable support could be a low-cost, environmentally benign and
efficient technique (Mishra et al. 2014, Oh et al. 2016) to achieve the desired outcomes is needed.
1 Nuclear Agriculture and Biotechnology Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai-400 085, India.
2 Homi Bhabha National Institute, Anushakti Nagar, Mumbai-400 094, India.
3 Department of Humanities and Applied Sciences, School of Management Science (SMS) Institute of Technology, College
of Engineering, Lucknow – 226001, Uttar Pradesh, India.
4 Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi,Uttar Pradesh, India.
* Corresponding author: archanam@barc.gov.in, archanamishra56@gmail.com