Background and Highlights

The increasing occurrence of pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, PFAS, microplastics, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and other emerging contaminants in aquatic environments poses significant challenges to conventional wastewater treatment and environmental remediation. Many of these contaminants are persistent and difficult to effectively remove using conventional approaches.

Recent advances in environmental biotechnology, including engineered microorganisms, microbial consortia, biocatalysis, synthetic biology, nanobiotechnology, and biohybrid systems, offer promising opportunities for more efficient and sustainable contaminant removal. These emerging approaches are enabling greater control over microbial functions, degradation pathways, and biological–material interactions.

This Special Issue aims to highlight next-generation biological technologies for the removal and transformation of emerging contaminants, with a focus on engineered, hybrid, and mechanism-driven biological systems and their potential for practical water and wastewater applications.

Particular emphasis will be placed on:

• Engineering biological systems and microbial communities to enhance contaminant degradation and treatment performance;
• Integrating microorganisms, enzymes, and nanomaterials into innovative biohybrid remediation platforms;
• Elucidating microbial–contaminant and microbe–material interactions and degradation mechanisms;
• Translating emerging biological technologies from laboratory research toward real wastewater applications and scalable treatment systems.

The Special Issue welcomes interdisciplinary contributions connecting environmental biotechnology, microbiology, materials science, and water and wastewater engineering.

Scope

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Engineered Biological Systems

• Engineered microorganisms and microbial consortia
• Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering
• Bioaugmentation and biofilm engineering
• Multi-omics approaches for microbial degradation

2. Biocatalytic and Biohybrid Technologies

• Enzyme-based and microbial biocatalysis
• Microbe–nanomaterial hybrid systems
• Nano-enabled bioremediation
• Bioelectrochemical and photo-biohybrid systems

3. Emerging Contaminant Remediation

• Pharmaceuticals and personal care products
• Antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance
• PFAS and other persistent contaminants
• Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, pesticides, microplastics, and other emerging contaminants

4. Mechanisms and Practical Applications

• Biodegradation mechanisms and transformation pathways
• Contaminant–microbe and microbe–material interactions
• Toxicity and risk of transformation products
• Integrated treatment systems, real wastewater applications, scale-up, sustainability, and techno-economic assessment