Augmented Biodegradation of Textile Azo Dye Effluents by Plant Endophytes: A Sustainable, Eco-Friendly Alternative

Textile industry consumes a large proportion of available water and releases huge amounts of toxic azo dye effluents, leading to an inevitable situation of acute environmental pollution that has been a significant threat to mankind. Decolorization or detoxification of harmful azo dyes has become a global priority to overcome the disastrous consequences and salvage the ecosystem. Biodegradation of textile azo dyes by endophytes stands to be a lucrative and viable alternative over conventional physico-chemical methods, owing to their eco-friendliness, cost-competitive and non-toxic nature. Especially, plant endophytic microbes exhibit promising biodegradation potential which has wired up the effective removal of textile azo dyes, attributing to their ability to produce dye degrading enzymes, laccases, peroxidases and azoreductases. Although both bacterial and fungal endophytes have been tried for azo dye degradation, endophytic fungi find broader application over bacteria. Despite of the advancements made in microbe-mediated biodegradation, there is still a need to fill the gap in lab to in situ translation of biodegradation research. This review concisely accentuates the xenobiotics of textile azo dyes and microbial mechanisms of biodegradation of textile azo dyes, positing plant endophytic community, especially bacterial and fungal endophytes as the potential dye degraders, highlighting currently reported dye degrading endophytic species.