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The formation of fungus-serpentine aggregation and its immobilization of lead(II) under acidic conditions

  • Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

Serpentine has weak immobilization capacity for Pb(II), especially under acidic conditions. In order to improve its application potential, a new biological modification method was adopted, i.e., the serpentine powder was weathered by Aspergillus niger and the fungus-serpentine aggregation (FSA) formed was investigated for its Pb(II) immobilization potential and underlying mechanism. Batch adsorption of Pb(II) by FSA closely followed the Langmuir model, while the maximum adsorption capacity of FSA (370.37 mg/g) was significantly higher than fungal mycelium (31.85 mg/g) and serpentine (8.92 mg/g). The adsorption process can be accurately simulated by pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Our data revealed the loading of organic matter is closely related to the adsorption of FSA, and the stronger immobilization capacity was mainly related to its modified porous organic-inorganic composite structure with extensive exchangeable ions. Moreover, FSA is an economical bio-material with excellent Pb(II) adsorption (pH = 1–8) along with significantly lower desorption efficiency (pH = 3–8), especially under acidic conditions. These findings provide a new perspective to explore the usage of fungus-minerals aggregation on heavy metals immobilization in acidic environments.

Key Points

• Co-culture of Aspergillus niger and serpentine produced a porous composite material like fungus-serpentine aggregation.

• Fungus-serpentine aggregation has a surprisingly higher adsorption capacity of Pb(II) and significantly lower desorption efficiency under acidic conditions.

• The loading of organic matter is closely related to the adsorption of FSA.

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All datasets obtained for this study are included in the manuscript/Supplementary material.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Prof. Quan Wan and Dr. Shuguang Yang from the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Juan Li from Nanjing University for their technical assistance.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41772360] and the Jiangsu Provincial Marine Science and Technology Innovation Special Project [grant number HY2019-3].

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Contributions

LB conceived and supervised the project. YC conducted experiments, designed the experiments, analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscript. ZL, SS, LY, and XM contributed significantly to analysis and manuscript preparation. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bin Lian.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Supplementary material related to this article can be found in online version of the paper.

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Yu, C., Zhang, L., Syed, S. et al. The formation of fungus-serpentine aggregation and its immobilization of lead(II) under acidic conditions. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 105, 2157–2169 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-021-11152-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-021-11152-x

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