Phytoremediation combined with biorefinery on the example of two agricultural crops grown on Ni soil and degraded by P. chrysosporium

During the last few decades, phytoremediation process has attracted much attention because of the growing concerns about the deteriorating quality of soil caused by anthropogenic activities. Here, a tandem phytoremediation/biorefinery process was proposed as a way to turn phytoremediation into a viable commercial method by producing valuable chemicals in addition to cleaned soil. Two agricultural plants (Sinapis alba and Helianthus annuus) were grown in moderately contaminated soil with ca. 100 ppm of Ni and further degraded by a fungal lignin degrader - Phanerochaete chrysosporium. Several parameters have been studied: the viability of plants, biomass yield and their accumulating and remediating potentials. Further down-stream processing showed that up to 80% of Ni can be easily extracted from contaminated biomass by aqueous extraction at mild conditions. Finally, it was demonstrated that the grown onto contaminated soil plants can be degraded by Phanerochaete chrysosporium and the effect of nickel and biomass pre-treatment on the solid state fermentation was studied. The proposed and studied in this work methodology can pave the way to successful commercialization of the phytoremediation process in the near future.