Recent demonstrations of the removal and immobilization of inorganic contaminants by microbial transformations, sorption and mineralization show the potential of both natural and engineered microbes as bioremedial tools.
Moreover, the interactions between sulphur transformations and other processes including microbial transformations of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as the impact of plants are discussed.
Vermicompost is the cast obtained from the ingested biomass by earthworm after undergoing physical, chemical and microbial transformations.
An integrated conceptual sewer model for microbial transformations of organic matter and sulfur components in wastewater is presented.
Iodine behavior in the environment is complicated by its multiple physical states, multiple redox states, interactions with OM, and microbial transformations.
This is extremely important for an understanding of microbial processes occurring in environmental and engineered biofilm systems, because most microbial transformations are catalyzed by consortia and not by single species of microorganisms.
All the described taxonomic and metabolic diversity came from a surface sample of only 6 mussels in an area where mussels can number in the thousands per square meter, and thus indicates the quantitatively significant role that mussels may play in microbial transformations for the nearshore nitrogen and carbon cycles.
Microbial transformations further depend on the abundance and activity of micro-organisms and the stability of enzymes which are also related to temperature.
However, several forms of N are also pollutants, so soil microbial transformations of nitrogen also affect human and environmental health, sometimes far away from the microbes that performed the transformation.
Subsurface fluids from deep-sea hydrocarbon seeps undergo methane- and sulfur-cycling microbial transformations near the sediment surface.
It is abundant in the soil in proteins and, through a series of microbial transformations, ends up as sulfates usable by plants.
