Brewery yeast as a biosorbent for uranium

N. B. OMAR, M. L. MERROUN, M. T. GONZÁLEZ‐MUÑOZ AND J. M. ARIAS. 1996. Yeast cells are capable of carrying out biosorption with various heavy metals. The biomass deriving from Saccharomyces cerevisiae coming from brewing industries is a by‐product that is possible to be used in the purification of water contaminated with these ions. In this paper we show that yeast biomass from one of the city's breweries can adsorb uranium efficiently, up to 2.4mmol of this metal per gram of dry biomass. It can also be seen that the temperature (between 10° and 37°C) has no effect on the biosorption, while pH does have an influence, 4.5 being the best value. When the concentrations of uranium range between 0.1 and 0.5 mol 1‐1 the yeast dry biomass is capable of adsorbing between 84% and 98% of this metal in solution.