Toxicity of phenol solutions treated with rapeseed and tomato hairy roots

CINTIA PAISIO, P. GONZÁLEZ, A. GERBAUDO, M. BETUZZI, E. AGOSTINI

DESALINATION

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2010 vol. 263 p. 23 - 28

0011-9164

Phenolic compounds are frequently found in the effluent streams of many industries. In recent years, the use of hairy root cultures and the enzymes derived from them have been explored as a new alternative for the treatment of aqueous phenol solutions. In the present study, rapeseed and tomato hairy roots (HR) were used to remove efficiently phenol (100 to 250 mg/L) from aqueous solutions in a short time. The removal efficiencies were 95-80% and 60-70% to rapeseed and tomato HR respectively. Polyethylene-glycol (PEG) 3350 addition to the reaction medium, significantly enhanced removal efficiency of rapeseed HR reaching values of 98-88%. However, after to applying the removal process it is necessary to determine the toxicity of post-removal solutions to assess how safe the release of those products in receiving systems would be. Therefore, acute toxicity was evaluated by means of AMPHITOX bioassay. Phenol solutions treated with rapeseed HR had substantially lower toxicities than their corresponding initial toxicities. Moreover, PEG addition reduced the toxicity of these solutions. On the contrary, tomato HR could only be applied to reduce toxicity of solutions containing low phenol concentrations (100-150 mg/L), without adding PEG. From our results, it is relevant to point out the importance of studying different plant systems and reaction conditions in order to find the more suitable for remediation purposes