Role of microbial diversity for sustainable pyrite oxidation control in acid and metalliferous drainage prevention

Bacterial communities in the polluted area of pyrite tailings: From the upstream, pollutant source, and to the downstream

“…As the acidity of leachate, many heavy metals in pyrite tailings such as Mn, Cu, Zn, and Ni dissolved in the leachate leading to high heavy metal concentration and further increased the heavy metal concentration in downstream water. Strong acidity and high heavy metal concentration caused huge bacteriostasis (Ogbughalu et al, 2020) and resulted the culturable bacteria number decreased dramatically in downstream water (from 4100 CFU/mL in upstream to 2010 CFU/mL in downstream) even though TU in downstream water was high (from 0.50 NTU in upstream to 29.40 NTU in downstream) since the hydrolysis of Fe ions. From the perspective of culturable bacteria number, it might be di cult to treat undiluted or unpretreated pyrite tailings leachate with conventional bacteria based methods since the culturable bacteria number in pyrite tailings leachate was 8 times lower than that in natural river water in the upstream.…”

Investigating the oxidation mechanism of facet-dependent pyrite: implications for the environment and sulfur evolution

“…8 Oxidizing bacteria (especially acidophiles such as Thiobacillus ferrooxidans) also occupy a pivotal position in accelerating the oxidation process. [9][10][11] As a whole, the oxidation process of FeS 2 can be summarized as eqn (1)- (6). From the following equations, the oxidation reaction of FeS 2 mainly involves the oxidation of Fe and S elements (S L includes a large amount of elemental S (S 0 ) and a small amount of polysuldes (S n 2− )), which produces lots of acidity and iron (hydro)oxide.…”

Autotrophic Denitrification of Nitrate Rich Wastewater in Fluidized Bed Reactors Using Pyrite and Elemental Sulfur as Electron Donors

“…Iron sulfide minerals (e.g. pyrite, pyrrhotite and marcasite) have recently attracted attention as sustainable substrates for autotrophic denitrifying bacteria (Hu et al, 2020;Pu et al, 2015), they are cheap, ubiquitous in the earth's crust (Ogbughalu et al, 2020) and are stable, with low solubility in anoxic environments. This behavior makes them suitable, slow-release electron donors for autotrophic denitrification.…”