Coverage of metallic chemical elements that, owing to high density, are toxic at low concentrations. Examples include camium, arsenic, chromium, thallium and lead.
The cell walls of magnetotactic bacteria are surrounded by an external membrane composed of sugars and fat-like components: potential docking sites for uranium.
A research team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has managed to purify water containing uranium using a special kind of bacteria known as magnetotactic bacteria.
"This work may be pertinent to water quality issues both locally and globally," says Benjamin Shindel, a Ph.D. student in Germany. "We want to see this out in the world, where it can make a real impact."
3D printing technique offers a cost-effective, scalable and simple approach to creating tunable adsorbents for environmental remediation that can be used broadly by the community for environmental remediation and sensing applications.
“Our work demonstrates unique capabilities of green and sustainable materials to be additively manufactured and designed so that they have the ability to capture and remove toxic contaminants," says Professor Andreescu.