Plants serve as excellent tracers of global pollution because they are present in almost all the habitats of the planet and accumulate chemical compounds. The potential of a semi-aquatic plant, Ipomea aquatica to uptake and metabolize sulfamethoxazole (SMX) was investigated in this study. I. aquatica exhibited 100% removal of 0.05 mg L−1 SMX from synthetic medium within 24 h. The I. aquatica achieved 93, 77 and 72% removal of SMX at 0.2, 0.5 and 1 mg L−1, respectively after 48 h, which indicated that efficiency of I. aquatica was deteriorating at high concentrations of SMX. The exposure of SMX even at high concentrations had minor influence on the contents of chlorophyll and carotenoids of I. aquatica. Similarly, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that exposure of SMX had insignificant impact on the structural morphology of roots, stems and leaves of the plant. The mechanism of removal by I. aquatica was explored by evaluating the contribution of bioadsorption, bioaccumulation and biodegradation of SMX. There was no adsorption and accumulation of SMX in the roots. Moreover, accumulation of SMX in stems was not observed; however, I. aquatica accumulated 17% of SMX in the leaves. This accumulation was supposedly followed by the biotransformation of SMX as a part of detoxification process. The gas chromatographic-mass spectroscopic (GC-MS) data suggested that I. aquatica biodegraded the SMX into simpler compounds, and generated 4-aminophenol as its final product. A laboratory scale phytoreactor was used to investigate the application of I. aquatica in a simulated system where it achieved 49% removal of SMX (0.2 mg L−1) in 10 d.

Removal and degradation mechanism of sulfamethoxazole by Ipomea aquatica from aquatic system: A labscale phytoreactor study

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.