Fungal Spent Media Regulated Biological Control A Novel and Sustainable Approach for the Management of Pathogens in Wastewater

Abstract

Water is an indispensable resource for human existence, and the consumption of unsafe water has serious connotations for human well-being. According to the 2021 World Water Development Report by UNESCO, drinking contaminated water has contributed to more than 8,29,000 deaths worldwide yearly from diarrhoea and poor sanitation (L. Lin et al., 2022). Bacteria, viruses, parasitic protozoans, and helminths in wastewater are human pathogens that present significant health risks. Conventional methods applied towards microbe removal, including oxidation, chlorination, and ozonation, suffer from the disadvantages of producing toxic disinfection by-products with energy consumption, high cost, less disinfection capability, solid waste generation and membrane fouling (Jabbar and Esmail Ebrahim, 2022) necessitating the search for alternative sustainable disinfection strategies. Microbiome engineering improves the overall function of any ecosystem by changing the composition of microbes rather than reducing them altogether (Albright et al., 2022). Among all the pathogens, removing or inactivating dormant helminth eggs/cysts is one of the most challenging tasks. Their low infectious dosage, high persistence of different endoparasitic stages, lengthy environmental survival, and high resistance of the eggs (infective forms) to adverse environmental conditions make these worms the main barrier to reusing wastewater in agriculture (Mahapatra et al., 2022). High resistance of the cysts/eggs to degradation often is owing to the cyst wall s composite structure made of structural polysaccharides primarily chitin and proteins and sometimes lipids (Mkandawire et al., 2022). Only specific cell wall hydrolases such as chitinases and proteases are capable to degrade the cyst walls. On the other hand, bacteria make up the largest category of human pathogens discovered in wastewater. Despite the growing threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and antibiotic-resistant genes (ARG), the development of accessible, low-cost technology..