Valorization of natural biomasses and exhausted industrial composites via bioorganic approaches

Environmental remediation often requires technology at the interface between material science, chemistry and biology, aiming to cheap materials with low environmental impact themselves.[1] Artificial sources or nonNature derived matrices should be optimized to avoid delivery of toxic side metabolites, produced with ecocompatible chemical conversion, and possibly imply resorption or recycle.[2] Here we present two different time-cost efficient, environmentally friendly, sustainable, and effective biohybrid systems produced via various approaches. The first exploits the naturally porous eggs capsules produced by Hexaplex trunculus (known as the banded dye-murex), a well-known marine gastropod mollusks, in the Muricidae family. After the eggs release, these porous capsuled structures exhibit a sponge-like, biomineralized, proteinaceous bulk whose sacculae are considered here as a powerful natural, unexplored matrix to be used for removing pollutants from water, due to its rehydratable property. The bioorganic chemistry tool here helped to improve the selectivity of this material towards the adsorption of specific organic pollutants. We exploited a 2-steps decoration process consisting of a bioconjugation with a gallic acid moiety via suberic acid bis(N- hydroxysuccinimide ester) condensation, targetting the exposed Lysine tags, followed by a chemical reduction of the carbonyl in amide function via LiAlH4. In a second tale, exhausted polyurethane elastic foam has been valorised and utilized as a polymeric bulk to chemically immobilize Pseudomonas fluorescens bacteria for soil bioremediation purposes. The exploited chemistry here consisted of a hydroxy-indole-based polymer, processable in water with strong sticky properties [3] and biocompatibility, bearing methyn-aminophenyl boronic units [4] capable of direct addressing bacteria on polyurethane foams via ester cyclization of the bioinspired polymer and the vicinal diols of the bacterial external glycocalyx. This biomimetic, melanin like polymer resulted efficient also in decreasing the delivery of microplastics from polyurethane foam structures