The co-culture of cyanobacteria and heterotrophic bacteria can utilize the advantages of both bacteria, effectively remove pollutants and relieve the feedback inhibition effect in algae culture; however, little information is available in heavy metal removal.
Amongst co-culture systems, Leptolyngbya + Sl showed the highest Cd removal efficiencies of 93.2%, 71.8%, 60.7%, 56.8% and 41.0% at initial Cd concentrations of 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 mg/L, respectively. In this co-culture system, Cd adsorbed on the cell wall was increased and the intracellular Cd was decreased, which alleviated the inhibitory effect of heavy metal on cyanobacteria.
The results indicated that the cyanobacteria-heterotrophic bacteria co-culture system can be used as an effective bioremediation method to remove heavy metals from aqueous solution.
We published this result in "Journal of Applied Phycology" under the title of "Improvement of the Cd removal efficiency of a filamentous cyanobacterium Leptolyngbya sp. XZ1 through co-culture with Bacillus sp. S1"(https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-023-03078-w).
