Over twenty years ago,when I first started working in this area,biosorption was more of a curiosity rather than a defined process.Several workers,mostly microbiologists,had already observed that microbial cells had the ability to concentrate,in their cellular mass,manyfold metals that existed in dilute concentrations in their aqueous environment.Researchers,like Polikarpov~1,attempted to quantify these observations by reporting "concentration factors" which indicated the number of times a specific metal concentration was increased into the cellular mass as compared to its concentration in the cells aquatic environment.In an indirect way biosorption of metals was also being used by microbiologists in the process of staining microbial cells in order to increase their electron density so they could be better studied under the electron microscope.
展开▼
