www.scholarsresearchlibrary.com t Available online a Scholars Research Library Annals of Biological Research, 2013, 4 (2):43-46 (http://scholarsresearchlibrary.com/archive.html) ISSN 0976-1233 CODEN (USA): ABRNBW 43 Scholars Research Library Bioremediation; a nature-based approach towards having a healthier environment Javad Kazemzadeh Khoei 1,2 , S. Farmohammadi 1,2 , A.S. Noori 2,3 and A. Padash 2 1 Deprartment of Microbiology, Faculty of Biology, Baku State University, Azerbaijan 2 Irainian Academic Centre for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR), Technology Development Branch, Iran 3 Department of Plant Science, Faculty of Biological Science, Tarbiyat Modares University, Tehran, Iran _____________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT Nowadays, biotechnology is considered as an important, new field of science and technology so that it allocates itself a large share of research costs in most large companies. By intensifying hazardous soil and water pollutions in the last two decades, environmental biotechnology has highly been taken into consideration. One of the main achievements of environmental biotechnology is bioremediation highly recommended to control water and soil pollutions. There have been a lot of studies to show the numerous benefits of bioremediation. The present study provides a short introduction to different kinds of bioremediation technique as well as its constraints and benefits in decontamination of soil and water. The result indicated some advantages of bioremediation including being cheap, easiness of use, ensuring permanent removal of pollutants, in-situ cleaning up, etc. However, some drawbacks have been found by the technology included slowness of biological processes and inability of microorganisms to degrade all the pollutants in the environment. To this end, it can be concluded that benefits stemming from bioremediation is much more than its constraints. The different methods of bioremediation techniques provides scientific a variety of choices to clean up contaminated water and soil resources. Key words: Ex-situ bioremediation, in-situ bioremediation, biostimulation, bioaugmentation _____________________________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION The entire surface of the earth is estimated to be about 14,477 million hectares of which more than 3000 million hectares have been exposed to chemical contamination. Different kinds of soils greatly differ in terms of geology, hydrology, climate, fertility and other physicochemical and biological characteristics. Physical and chemical characteristics of soils are so important in determining the fate of pollutants. By intensifying hazardous soil and water pollutions in the last two decades, a great deal of attention has lately been paid on environmental biotechnology by enormous scholars around the world and a variety of techniques has been presented by them until now. Environmental biotechnology is a multidisciplinary approach integrating science and engineering to use biochemical potential of microorganisms in order to remove pollutants from contaminated water and soil resources. One of the main achievements of environmental biotechnology is bioremediation highly recommended to control water and soil pollutions. Economic issues have persuaded scientists to apply biological processes in degradation of pollutant materials. Initial attempts to remove contaminants were mainly directed towards physical and chemical methods. However, it was found that the use of these methods alone is very expensive and often does not work. Other than incineration, biological methods including bioremediation would be the only practical solution to complete decomposition of organic materials. Bioremediation is a technique involving the use of microorganism to