Precision bioremediation of environmental pollutants: integrating multi-omics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence

Abstract

Activities from several Industrial, agricultural, and urban settings have led to alarming environmental pollution, with about 2.3 billion tonnes of chemicals being produced annually. In this review, we discuss the use of microbial degradation as an eco-friendly and cost-effective option for the cleanup of the environment. We examine the core mechanisms of pollutant degradation, featuring principal microbes such as bacteria (Bacillus spp, Pseudomonas spp, Rhodococcus spp, Alcanivorax spp), fungi (Phanerochaete spp, Chrysosporium spp.), and their enzyme repertoire (oxygenases, dehalogenases, reductases). This review also considers how multi-omics technologies (proteomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) have led to a better understanding of microbial consortia interactions in polluted environments by allowing culture-free approaches. We also discuss the roles of biotechnological innovations such as CRISPR-based environmental engineering, synthetic biology, cell-free systems, engineered microbial consortia and artificial intelligence-driven predictive modelling in addressing the issues facing natural attenuation. However, in spite of the significant achievement that have been made using several clean up procedures to prevent or minimize environmental pollution there are still some challenges such as the effect of environmental complexity, microbial competition, and regulations for the use of genetically engineered organisms. This review discuss past prior and ongoing knowledge about microbial biodegradation using peer-reviewed literature from 2012–2026 to provide a framework for converting laboratory discoveries into field-level deployments to enable precision bioremediation approach for polluted ecosystem rehabilitation and public health safety.