Spray drying as a novel technique for obtaining microbial imprinted microspheres and its application in filtration

Abstract

A new nanotectonic approach is described to obtain novel materials by microbial imprinting on silica microspheres through evaporation induced self-assembly using spray drying. Escherichia coli served as the template and silica nanoparticles as the matrix for imprinting. The presence of microbial imprints on the microspheres was confirmed by scanning electron microscopy. It has been shown that microbial imprinted microspheres may be used efficiently to filter E. coli from water. The filtration behaviour of imprinted microspheres was investigated in a packed bed column in order to understand the effect on scale up, selectivity and reusability. Using ∼4.5 g of the imprinted material packed in a column to a bed volume of ∼10 cm³, almost 100 percent filtration efficiency was achieved when 20 L of feed solution containing ∼7 × 10⁶ cells per mL was perfused through the column.