BREWERY YEAST AS A BIOSORBENT FOR URANIUM

Yeast cells are capable of carrying out biosorption with various heavy metals. The biomass deriving from Saccharomyces cerevisiae coming fro m brewing industries is a by-product that is possible to be used in th e purification of water contaminated with these ions. In this paper we show that yeast biomass from one of the city's breweries can adsorb u ranium efficiently, up to 2.4 mmol of this metal per gram of dry bioma ss. It can also be seen that the temperature (between 10 degrees and 3 7 degrees C) has no effect on the biosorption, while pH does have an i nfluence, 4.5 being the best value. When the concentrations of uranium range between 0.1 and 0.5 mol l(-1) the yeast dry biomass is capable of adsorbing between 84% and 98% of this metal in solution.