Mycoremediation a promising strategy to challenge chemical food hazards

Abstract

With the fast growth of industrialization, intensive farming, and urban development, environmental pollution has evolved into a major global challenge. The poor handling, bad control, or inadequate management of waste and effluents from households, industries, and agricultural fields has been harming the ecosystem. Consequently, the development of effective, economically feasible, and sustainable remediation strategies has emerged as a key research priority in environmental biotechnology. Mycoremediation is a fungal based clean-up approach that exploits the capabilities of fungi such as biodegradation, biosorption, enzymatic detoxification, and symbiotic interactions. The broad spectrum of pollutants and contaminants introduced into nature without sufficient oversight, endangers global health, long-term environmental degradation and bioaccumulation in organisms, water, air, and diets. Food contamination may entail biological, chemical, physical, or allergenic agents that can taint edible material and most research focused primarily on the detection of chemical food safety hazards. Since 2000 the European Commission launched environmental compliance legislation to limit both their utilization and environmental release. Eco-friendly, sustainable and cost-effective technologies and solutions have been proposed as alternative choices, including treatments manipulating bacteria or fungi. In this narrative review we provide an overview on fungi as tools for the remediation of a plethora of chemicals such as xenobiotics, endocrine disruptor chemicals, synthetic dyes, micro- and nanoplastics, heavy metals, mycotoxins, dioxins, and metabolic modifiers, towards their degradation and neutralisation. The harmful effects of these hazards need mitigation through innovative, efficient, and sustainable decontamination strategies. A comprehensive and critical synthesis of the mechanisms underlying mycoremediation is provided, with particular emphasis on ligninolytic and oxidative enzymatic pathways, fungal metabolic functions, and pollutant specific transformation processes. Fungi have a reciprocal interplay with the hormonal system affecting homeostasis and it is evident that there are still many unaddressed gaps and technological opportunities that will need to be addressed before its recognition and approval. Mycoremediation of food hazards remains in its initial stages due to strict safety regulations and the risk of potential toxic by-product accumulation.