Bioremediation: Features, Strategies and applications

In early times, we believed that we had an unlimited abundance of land and resources; today, however, the resources in the world show, in greater or lesser degree, our carelessness and negligence in using them. The problems associated with contaminated sites now assume increasing prominence in many countries. Contaminated lands generally result from past industrial activities when awareness of the health and environmental effects connected with the production, use, and disposal of hazardous substances were less well recognized than today. Environmental contamination is increasing day by day because of increase in population, industrialization and urbanization Bioremediation is the technology that uses microorganism metabolism to remove pollutants it uses relatively lowcost, low-technology techniques, which generally have a high public acceptance and can often be carried out on site. This technology includes biostimulation (stimulating viable native microbial population), bioaugmentation (artificial introduction of viable population), bioaccumulation (live cells), biosorption (dead microbial biomass), phytoremediation (plants) and rhizoremediation (plant and microbe interaction).Rapid advances in the last few years has helped us in the understanding of process of bioremediation. The use of culture independent molecular techniques has definitely helped us to understand the microbial community dynamics, structure and assisted in providing the insight in to details of bioremediation which has surely facilitated to make the technology safer and reliable. This paper represents the special features, strategies, limitation and a variety of approaches of bioremediation.