Heavy metal removal from multicomponent system by the cyanobacterium Nostoc muscorum: kinetics and interaction study.

In this study, Nostoc muscorum, a native cyanobacterial species isolated from a coal mining site, was employed to remove Cu(II), Zn(II), Pb(II) and Cd(II) from aqueous solution containing these metals in the mixture. In this multicomponent study, carried out as per the statistically valid Plackett-Burman design of experiments, the results revealed a maximum removal of both Pb(II) (96.3 %) and Cu(II) (96.