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Micropollutants are a diverse group of compounds that are detected at trace concentrations and may have a negative effect on the environment and/or human health. Most of them are unregulated contaminants, although they have raised a concern in the scientific and global community and future regulation might be written in the near future. Several approaches have been tested to remove micropollutants from wastewater streams. In this manuscript, a focus is placed in reactor biological treatments that use white-rot fungi. A critical review of white-rot fungal-based technologies for micropollutant removal from wastewater has been conducted, several capabilities and limitations of such approaches have been identified and a range of solutions to overcome most of the limitations have been reviewed and/or proposed. Overall, this review argues that white-rot fungal reactors could be an efficient technology to remove micropollutants from specific wastewater streams. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd, This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project CTM2016-75587-C2-1-R ) and partly supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Consolidated Research Group 2017-SGR-14 ). The Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) is member of the Xarxa de Referència en Biotecnologia de la Generalitat de Catalunya. J.A. Mir-Tutusaus acknowledges the predoctoral grant from UAB .

Ureases are enzymes highly desirable in immobilized form for a number of applications that exploit urea cleavage and an increase in pH, inherent to the reaction. Major among them are medical and analytical applications, but there have emerged new biotechnological and engineering areas, proving that there exists a growing demand for robust reliable immobilized urease preparations with defined properties. These can be assured by immobilizing the enzymes. By creating disturbance in the original state of enzymes, immobilizations inevitably change enzyme properties, enabling them to be customized for specific applications. In this context, this article offers a review of reports on immobilizations of ureases covering the last two decades. It surveys the immobilization techniques and support materials applied, in addition to the resulting properties of the enzymes. In this manner it attempts to provide useful guidance through the wealth of available immobilization data in the literature, but more importantly, to develop an integrated perspective on how to customize ureases for their applications, which may help establish rational immobilization procedures in place of tedious experimental optimization.