Soil bacteria communities become richer and more diverse on exposure to graphene oxide, new research shows.1 This unexpected finding, unearthed by scientists in China, highlights that despite graphene oxide’s potential for widespread environmental release, little is known about its ecological impact.
Digging deeper into the environmental impact of nanomaterial contamination © Shutterstock
Graphene oxide’s abundance of surface oxygen-containing groups makes it a useful precursor to the graphene-based materials poised to revolutionise electronics and nanoproduct industries. Soil ecosystems will likely bear the brunt of nanomaterial contamination and while previous studies have looked at graphene oxide’s effect in pure bacterial cultures, soil is a much more complicated medium with diverse microbial communities that demand closer investigation. Now a team led by Xiangang Hu and Qixing Zhou’s of Nankai University has studied the effects of graphene oxide in the soil for 90 days using high-throughput sequencing analysis.
To read the full article visit Chemistry World.
Graphene oxide regulates the bacterial community and exhibits property changes in soil
Junjie Du, Xiangang Hu and Qixing Zhou
RSC Adv., 2015,5, 27009-27017
DOI: 10.1039/C5RA01045D, Paper
