Fall Meeting 2022

December 12 - 16, 2022

Aquatic reservoirs are currently threatened by multiple anthropogenic activities such as chemical pollution, resource extraction, oceanic transport, and so on. The presence of an ever-increasing list of contaminants or emerging pollutants is the most serious challenge in the water environment.  There is abundant evidence from the literature indicating that contaminants namely dyes, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides, and heavy metals are aggravated to cause serious health issues on flora, fauna, human beings, and marine ecosystems. Conventional water treatment processes are highly expensive, high-energy input to operate, and most importantly, generate secondary pollutants. Here in this study, we propose a hybrid nano-bioremediation strategy for synergistic degradation of organic contaminants. Graphene oxide (GO) is a two-dimensional allotrope of carbon consisting of hexagonally bonded sp² hybridized carbon atoms and oxygen-containing groups on the basal plane and the edges. The multifunctional graphene oxide nanosheet served as a microbial growth enhancer as well as adsorption of contaminants on its surface. These findings help us bridge the knowledge gap of live bacterial encapsulation as a potential scale-up technology to clean up contaminants in a new sustainable approach.