pharmaceutical-waste
Pharmaceutical waste refers to the contamination of soil and water environments by residual drugs, hormones, and other medicinal compounds discarded from human and veterinary medicine. These compounds can be absorbed by plants through their root systems, potentially altering growth, metabolism, and secondary metabolite production in ways that affect both crop safety and ecosystem health. Understanding how plants respond to and accumulate pharmaceutical pollutants is critical for assessing food safety risks and developing phytoremediation strategies to clean contaminated environments.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-04-20
Researchers converted antibiotic-production waste — dead bacterial biomass — into a highly efficient filter for toxic dyes in pharmaceutical wastewater. Treating the biomass with a common surfactant (SDS) doubled its cleaning power, reaching ~98% dye removal at half the dose, with AI models used to optimize conditions.
SDS-modified bacterial biomass achieved ~98% dye removal at 2 g/L, compared to 4 g/L required for unmodified biomass to reach similar efficiency.
DFT quantum chemistry calculations showed the surfactant treatment nearly doubled adsorption energy (from -1.42 to -2.87 eV), explaining the mechanistic improvement.
An artificial neural network (ANN) outperformed linear regression, decision tree, and random forest models in predicting dye removal, and was coupled with genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization to identify optimal operating conditions.