Metabolism and application of perchlorate reducing bacteria in microbial reduction of perchlorate: a review

As an economical, efficient and less secondary pollution technology, microbial method has obtained notable achievements and concerns for removal of ClO^-4. The current review comprehensively summarizes the main mechanisms, source and screening of micro-organisms, major influencing factors (ie., electron acceptor, electron donor, pH, temperature, salinity, heavy metals and so on, on the performance of perchlorate reducing bacteria as well as the application status reported in literatures. The results demonstrated that perchlorate reducing bacteria are abundant under ambient conditions and it can easily reduce ClO^-4 through a series of reductases, but different microorganisms may have different pathways and that should be revealed in the future research, furthermore, operational parameters and environmental factors could exert significant effects on the performance of perchlorate reducing bacteria to degrade ClO^-4, positively or negatively. Dosing extra electron donor is still the defects of microbial method, thus the technology has not been applied widely yet in some degree. Based on that understandings, establishing an economical strategy for electron donors should be explored. New option of electron donor dosing and the future research direction were proposed to provide some insights to the pertinent engineering challenges of perchlorate reducing bacteria in the degradation of ClO^-4.