Emerging organic contaminants (EOCs) consist of a large and relatively new group of chemical compounds such as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) as well as
pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PCPs). Despite their generally low
concentrations in the environment they can cause toxic effects on biota while they
remain in the environment since they are continuously released. They are mainly
entering to the environment through the effluents of wastewater treatment plants
because these systems have not been developed to treat this kind of compounds. Metals are considered as the main toxic and genotoxic compounds present in hydrosoluble fractions. When they are released to soil or water bodies, they remain there since they cannot be degraded. They can only be transferred.
Phytoremediation–based technologies are environmentally friendly alternatives for
cleaning up soils or (ground)waters contaminated with metals and/or a variety of
organic pollutants. These treatment methods exploit plants, their associated
microorganisms and the developed interactions for contaminant removal or
enhancement of plant stabilization and survival in such adverse environments.
Constructed Wetlands (CWs) are low-cost wastewater treatment technologies that are part of phytoremediation applications. They are simplified systems but several
physicochemical and biological processes take place in order to clean the water.
In this thesis, an integrated approach exploiting the wetland plant Juncus acutus and its indigenous endophytic community was followed in order to investigate the capability of this meta-organism to clean water contaminated with metals, bisphenol-A, ciprofloxacin and/or sulfamethoxazole.
After confirming experimentally the ability of the plant to treat efficiently bisphenol-
A-contaminated water, the associated endophytic community of Juncus acutus was
isolated and characterized. Many strains expressed plant growth promoting
characteristics and were found to possess increased tolerance to metals such as Zn, Ni, Pb and Cd. Moreover, several endophytic bacterial strains tolerated and even used bisphenol-A and/or antibiotics (ciprofloxacin and sulfamethoxazole) as the sole carbon source.
Some strains combined many of the desired characteristics and they were further used in a bioaugmentation strategy in order to investigate their potential to improve the efficiency of the wetland helophyte Juncus acutus to deal with mixed pollution
consisting of emerging organic...