Bioengineering of CuO structured macro-biotemplate for the ultra-efficient and selective hand-retrieval of glyphosate from agro-farms.

Glyphosate (Gly) is a massively utilized toxic herbicide exceeding its statutory restrictions, causing adverse environmental and health impacts. Engineered nanomaterials, even though are integral to remediate Gly, their practical use is limited due to time and energy driven purifications, and negative environmental impacts. Here, a 3D wide area (~1.6 ± 0.4 cm) CuO nanoparticle supported biotemplate is designed using fish-scale wastes as a sustainable approach for the ultra-efficient and selective hand-remediation of Gly from real-time samples from agro-farms. While the innate metal binding and reducing ability of collagenous scales aided self-synthesis cum grafting of CuO, the selective binding potential of CuO to Gly facilitated its hand-retrieval; as assessed using optical characterizations, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. Optimization studies revealed extractions of diverse pay-loads of Gly between 0.1 μg/mL to 40 μg/mL per 80 mg biotemplate grafted with ~6.354 μg of sub-5 nm CuO and was exponential to the number of CuO@biotemplates. Even though pH and surfactant didn't have any impact on the adsorption of Gly to the CuO@biotemplates, increase in the ionic strength led to a drastic increase in the adsorption. Density function theory simulations unveiled the involvement of phosphonic and carboxylic groups of Gly for interaction with CuO with a bond length of 1.826 Å and 1.833 Å, respectively. Overall, our sustainably generated, cost-efficient, hand-retrievable CuO supported biotemplate can be generalized to extract diverse organophosphorus toxins from agro-farms and other sewage embodiments. SYNOPSIS: Glyphosate is an excessively applied herbicide with potent health hazards and carcinogenicity. Thus, a hand removable CuO-supported biotemplate to selectively and efficiently remediate glyphosate from irrigation water is developed.