Residual waste from mushroom cultivation purifies harmful substances from water – News

After two to seven days, the researchers checked whether the concentrations of the substances had changed. It turned out that, depending on the substance, 10 to 90 percent had been removed from the water. Van Brenk: “Current, comparable methods for purifying water often only work for one or two different substances. Although the substrate does not work equally well for all substances, these results show that it can remove a wide range of substances from water. Other methods with a wide range are usually quite expensive.”

Mold tea

The researchers also made a kind of tea from the substrate, simply by leaving it in water for a while and then removing the pieces of substrate. They then mixed the tea with the contaminated water, and the researcher tested how good the tea was at removing harmful substances from the water. That turned out to be a lot less good than the substrate itself.

According to Van Brenk, this says something about how the substrate removes substances from the water: “We actually thought that the enzymes secreted by the fungus were mainly responsible for the removal of the harmful substances. These end up in the tea, so if that were actually the case, the tea should work just as well as the substrate. But that’s not the case, so there was still a large part of the substrate’s function that we couldn’t fully explain.”

But the researchers did have ideas about possible explanations. Further tests showed that either enzymes that are present in the hyphae and are not secreted, or bacteria that remain attached to the substrate, play a role. A chemical reaction that takes place in the substrate also appears to make a significant contribution to the removal of the substances.