Bioaccumulation and Biosorption: The Prospects and Future Applications 63

which can disrupt the reactor’s balance (El Sayed and El Sayed 2020). The characteristics of cell

walls, which are critical for heavy metal adsorption, can be influenced by the age of the biomass.

The link between biomass age and heavy metal adsorption is not understood well, according to

several observations. Older cultures may have a broader ability to remove metals than younger

cultures, depending on the organisms used during the sorption process and biomagnification, or vice

versa. (Elahian et al. 2017).

4.7.5 Inclusion of Other Ions in the Solution

Wastewaters are contaminated with a number of pollutants, including multiple types of metals,

which affect biosorption dynamics. Metal biosorption might be hampered by the presence of other

dissolved substances in a solution (Du et al. 2016). This is due to competition for binding places on

the surface of cells between ions of metals that have been eliminated and other ions.

4.8 Application of Biosorption and Bioaccumulation

• The elimination of metal cations from fluids is mainly accomplished through biosorption and

bioaccumulation.

• Wastewaters from the metallurgical sector, rinsed waters from electroplating, metal polishing,

printed circuit board manufacture, mining operations, leachates, surface and ground waters are

among the effluents that can be treated by both biosorption and bioaccumulation.

• Biosorption and bioaccumulation can remove a wide range of sorbates, including Al, Cd, Cr,

Co, Cu, Au, Fe, Pb, Mn, Hg, Mo, Ni, Ag, U, V and Zn.

• During the 1980s and 1990s, pilot installations and a few commercial-scale units were built in

the United States and Canada. The applicability of biosorption as a basis for metal sequestering/

recovery procedures was confirmed in these pilot plants, particularly in the case of uranium.

It was put to test as part of a biotechnologically based uranium production plan that included

in situ bioleaching. These pilot plants let researchers discover the drawbacks of employing

biosorption with inactive microbial biomass in an industrial setting, owing to the high expense

of converting the biomass into a suitable biosorbent material (Ying et al. 2008).

• The detrimental influence of co-ions in the solution on the immobilized microbial biomass’s

uptake of the targeted metals, as well as the biological material’s diminished resilience, make

recycling and reuse of the biosorbent even more challenging.

• Biosorption, on the other hand, is a process with a few distinct properties. It has great

effectiveness in sequestering dissolved metals from very dilute complicated solutions. As a

result, biosorption is an excellent contender for the treatment of complicated wastewaters with

high volume but low concentration. Additionally, it has recently been demonstrated that in

biological reactors with metabolically active microbial cells, biosorption works in tandem with

other metabolically induced mechanisms such as bioprecipitation and bio reduction. As a result,

in any metal-bearing water-treatment method based on the interactions of microbial cells with

soluble metal species, biosorption should always be considered a metal immobilization process.

• It is feasible to use biomass as a source of specialized binding molecules that can be used to

separate valuable biomolecules from a mixture. This would allow for a single-step recovery

while reducing the number of traditional separation steps.

• Another strategy is to use biomass as a carrier of highly accessible microelements in livestock

diets, substituting microelements linked to the biomass via biosorption or bioaccumulation for

microelements provided in the form of inorganic salts. The focus would be on bio binding

rather than bio removal in this case.