Harnessing Mushrooms as Bioindicators to Monitor Heavy Metal Pollution

ABSTRACT Mushrooms are spore‐bearing eukaryotic organisms that are capable of accumulating heavy metals. They are considered bioexcluders or hyperaccumulators of heavy metals since they can grow in the metal‐contaminated areas. Industrialization, urbanization, and other anthropogenic activities cause the release of heavy metals into the environment. The heavy metal contamination in the environment causes various toxic effects on the organisms. Traditional methods of finding heavy metal contamination are costly and cause various disruptions in the environment. Therefore, detection of heavy metal contamination using bioindicators such as mushrooms offers a quick and sustainable solution. Since mushrooms can be simply grown in natural soils contaminated by the heavy metals, further research on optimizing mushrooms can greatly help to monitor the prevalence of heavy metals at the polluted site. Analytical methods such as inductively coupled plasma‐mass spectrometry (ICP‐MS), atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS), and inductively coupled plasma‐optical emission spectrometry (ICP‐OES) are used to determine heavy metal concentrations in the mushroom samples. Various omics tools can be used for understanding gene‐level expression of mushrooms during the metal stress condition. Advances in molecular biology, synthetic biology, and gene‐editing technologies have significantly enhanced the utility of mushrooms for monitoring and remediating heavy metal pollution. CRISPR/Cas technology can also be used in mushrooms to engineer strains with enhanced heavy metal uptake and tolerance for improved monitoring.