The central principle of bioremediation is that microorganisms are able to produce energy they need to grow and reproduce by degrading hazardous contaminants. In some cases, bioremediation occurs spontaneously because the essential materials required for bacterial growth are naturally present at the contaminated sites. More often, bioremediation requires an engineered bacterial system to accelerate the tailor-made biodegradation of organic compounds or bio-adsorption of inorganic elements as we desired [2, 3]. It is also needed to further optimize the environmental conditions, in which the microorganisms carry out the detoxification reactions by employing several engineered microorganism systems such as cell surface display- and secretion-based strategies to remediate the contaminated environment. Cell surface display technologies have widely been used in both pharmaceutical and bioremediation applications such as live vaccine development, antibody production, peptide library screening, biosensors, bio-adsorption of organic and inorganic pollutants, and whole-cell biocatalysis (Fig. 1) [4–7].Fig. 1Application of different cell surface display technologies in A antibody production, B peptide library screening, C biosensors, D biocatalysts, E bio-adsorption, and F vaccine development