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Strategies for anti-oxidative stress and anti-acid stress in bioleaching of LiCoO2 using an acidophilic microbial consortium

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Abstract

High metal ion concentrations and low pH cause severely inhibit the activity of an acidophilic microbial consortium (AMC) in bioleaching. This work investigated the effects of exogenous spermine on biofilm formation and the bioleaching efficiency of LiCoO2 by AMC in 9K medium. After the addition of 1 mM spermine, the activities of glutathione peroxidase and catalase increased, while the amount of H2O2, intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) and malondialdehyde in AMC decreased. These results indicated that the ability of AMC biofilm to resist oxidative stress introduced by 3.5 g/L Li+ and 30.1 g/L Co2+ was improved by spermine. The activity of glutamate decarboxylase was promoted to restore the intracellular pH buffering ability of AMC. Electrochemical measurements showed that the oxidation rate of pyrite was increased by exogenous spermine. As a result, high bioleaching efficiencies of 97.1% for Li+ and 96.1% for Co2+ from a 5.0% (w v−1) lithium cobalt oxide powder slurry were achieved. This work demonstrated that Tafel polarization can be used to monitor the AMC biofilm’s ability of uptaking electrons from pyrite during bioleaching. The corrosion current density increased with 1 mM spermine, indicating enhanced electron uptake by the biofilm from pyrite.

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Acknowledgements

This work was generously supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21878083).

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21878083). National Natural Science Foundation of China, 21878083

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Dehong Liu, Hongjie Shi, Guanglin Chen, Xu Zhang, Minglong Zhu & Wensong Tan

  2. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA

    Tingyue Gu

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  1. Dehong Liu
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  2. Hongjie Shi
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  3. Guanglin Chen
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  4. Xu Zhang
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  5. Tingyue Gu
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  7. Wensong Tan
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Contributions

DL: visualization, writing–original draft, investigation, methodology, data curation. HS: conceptualization, data curation, validation. TG: data curation, writing–review and editing, validation. GC: resources, investigation. MZ and WT: investigation, software. XZ: conceptualization, methodology, data curation, writing–review and editing, validation, supervision.

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Correspondence to Xu Zhang or Tingyue Gu.

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Liu, D., Shi, H., Chen, G. et al. Strategies for anti-oxidative stress and anti-acid stress in bioleaching of LiCoO2 using an acidophilic microbial consortium. Extremophiles 26, 22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-022-01270-3

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