Insight into the role of different extracellular polymeric substances components on trimethoprim adsorption by activated sludge

Extracellular polymeric substances—antibiotics interaction in activated sludge: A review

“…Recently, tremendous works have clarified the role of EPS in environmental remediation and stress resistance, especially for emerging contaminants such as antibiotics and ARGs [ [17] , [18] , [19] ]. Sludge EPS, especially proteins and polysaccharides with abundant functional groups, such as carboxyl, amine, and hydroxyl groups, can effectively bind with antibiotics and form a stable EPS-antibiotics complex, thereby achieving the efficient removal of antibiotics (>60%) [ 20 ].…”

“…Three stages of rapid adsorption, stable adsorption, and saturation adsorption could be observed during antibiotics sorption onto sludge EPS [ [18] , [33] ]). Among the kinetic models, in comparison with the pseudo-first-order reaction kinetics equation, the pseudo-second-order kinetics equation exhibited a better fit for antibiotics (e.g., trimethoprim, sulfonamide, tetracycline) adsorption simulation, implying that the adsorption was driven by chemical action [ [17] , [18] , [35] , [34] ]. Additionally, the sorption isotherm analysis revealed that the Freundlich equation might be much more suitable for illuminating the sorption characteristics between EPS and antibiotics (e.g., quinolone, sulfonamide, tetracycline, ciprofloxacin) than the Langmuir model, indicating that multilayer adsorption or even more complex sorption might occur on the microbial EPS surface [ [32] , [35] , [36] , [37] ].…”

A Review of the Role of Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPS) in Wastewater Treatment Systems

“…Underestimation of the total polymer. [11,22,33] HCHO/NaOH HCHO reduces the cell lysis caused by NaOH addition.…”