Our paper was accepted last week in a journal of the American Chemical Society; ACS Sustainable Chemistry.
This work focuses on the decontamination of organic pollutants in water using bio-inspired materials derived from nucleic acids. A communication should be made at the level of CBRS (INC) and UB in the near future.
Abstract
Water is essential for human health and economic development due to its use in many areas such as food, sanitation, agriculture or energy etc. The presence of organic pollutants in water such as residues from pharmaceutical molecules, cosmetics, pesticides, endocrine disruptors represent a major problem for humans and their environment. Today, despite the various processes currently used for wastewater treatment, the presence of these residual organic contaminants, even at low doses, remains a major concern for populations. The impact of these contaminants on humans and the environment is not yet fully understood, and water pollution is the subject of growing interest by health authorities around the world. New decontamination strategies are necessary to addres this major issue. In the contribution published in the journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS, Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering) an alternative to conventional decontamination systems is proposed. The work carried out by the ChemBioPharm team (ARNA UMR5320-INSERM U1212 laboratory) has demonstrated that bio-inspired materials derived from nucleic acids (nucleolipids, NL) can intimately and effectively trap residues of pharmaceuticals and / or pesticides in their aggregates. Noteworthy, these polymer-free biomaterials can also quantitatively decontaminate cocktails of organic pollutants including mixtures of pesticides and / or drugs. These promising results open up new perspectives in wastewater treatment.
