HR: 10:20h
AN: B12A-01 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: Thermodynamic Modeling of the Adsorption of Metals onto Microbial Cell Walls: Current Challenges
AU: * Fein, J B
EM: fein@nd.edu
AF: University of Notre Dame, 156 Fitzpatrick Hall Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences, Notre Dame, IN 46556, United States
AB: Adsorption of metals onto biological surfaces can influence the speciation, bioavailability, and mobility of metals in a range of geologic systems. In this talk, I will summarize research that improves our understanding of metal adsorption reactions involving microbial cell walls (including bacterial, fungal, algal, and plant root cells). The review covers two general types of investigations: 1) those that aim to improve our molecular-scale understanding of metal adsorption onto cell walls, thereby improving the accuracy of thermodynamic adsorption models; and 2) those that aim to improve our ability to apply thermodynamic models of metal-microbial adsorption to complex realistic settings. The first type of research involves a range of experimental approaches, and the most common approaches will be described. The second type of research results from the need to balance the flexibility that comes with chemical sophistication in geochemical models with the practical impossibility of modeling the complexity of real systems at a molecular scale. Hybrid approaches that incorporate some degree of molecular-scale insight with testable simplifying assumptions are described and offer some hope for extrapolating our newfound molecular-scale understanding of metal-microbial adsorption reactions to estimate mass transport in microbe-bearing systems. The objective of this review is to describe both progress and remaining challenges, in order to promote research that ultimately will yield accurate and flexible models of the effects of microbial adsorption on metal distributions and speciation in natural geologic systems.
DE: 0448 Geomicrobiology
DE: 0461 Metals
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting