Sustainable bioactive hydrogels for organic contaminant elimination in wastewater

Jinlong Zhang, Jason C. White, Jinglei He, Xuefeng Yu, Chuanhao Yan, Liang Dong, Shu Tao and Xilong Wang ()
Additional contact information
Jinlong Zhang: Peking University
Jason C. White: The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station
Jinglei He: Peking University
Xuefeng Yu: Peking University
Chuanhao Yan: Peking University
Liang Dong: Peking University
Shu Tao: Peking University
Xilong Wang: Peking University

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Immobilized enzyme bioremediation is a promising technique for eliminating pollutants to alleviate water scarcity pressure but is severely hindered by poor enzymatic activity and stability. An effective charge-assisted H-bonding approach is developed to achieve high laccase loading and enzymatic activity on bio(cellulose)-based hydrogels. Notably, this strategy can be readily extended to lipase and catalase. The bio-based hydrogels are synthesized by grafting deoxyribonucleic acid onto the cellulose backbone through a one-step structural regulation, achieving high mechanical strength, enzyme loading and contaminant capture for degradation. The biocompatible laccase-immobilized hydrogels exhibit significant removal and degradation performance for diverse organic micropollutants, including parent and substituted polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, antibiotics and organic dyes. Further testing focused on parent and substituted polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons shows minimal influence of various co-existing interfering substances on performance of the laccase-immobilized bioactive hydrogel, with its contaminant removal and degradation efficiency in authentic wastewater being 93.0- and 64.3-fold that of commercial free laccase, respectively. This work provides an effective strategy for sustainable bioremediation of wastewater and other pollutant streams, while simultaneously enabling the development of innovative enzyme catalysts.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57720-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-57720-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57720-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().