16. Biotechnological Intervention to Enhance the Potential Ability of Bioenergy Plants for Phytoremediation

Phytoremediation has emerged as an attractive idea for the utilization of plants and the microbial communities for the environmental cleanup. Despite of advances made in this research area, there are still blockades for its implication on a wide scale. These hurdles include limited metabolic rate of plants and failure to break down numerous complex compounds or to tolerate/accumulate heavy metals. The in-depth knowledge of the factors affecting contaminant’s translocation, volatilization, uptake, bioavailability and degradation is required, in order to increase the phytoremediation potential of bioenergy crops. The use of bioenergy crops has offered a viable option for phytoremediation that can aid to the energy supply and showed a pivotal role in meeting the targeted goals for the use of renewable energy sources. Moreover, genetic engineering has opened new avenues in this research area, by offering the chance for the direct gene transfer to enhance bioenergy crops/plant capabilities for environmental cleanup. The advanced “omics” methods will increase our understanding towards integrated activity patterns between plants and associated microorganism and harness it to the growth, structural organization of microbial communities, accumulation, tolerance and detoxification to increase phytoremediation capability of the plant. In this chapter, the mechanism of phytoremediation and new high-throughput biotechnological strategies adopted to enhance the ability of phytoremediation potential of bioenergy crops have been described with challenges harnessing plants in phytoremediation.