Recently, the research team led by Li Juying at Shenzhen University published a paper titled “Circumneutral Microbial Fenton Catalysis: Harnessing Iron-Redox Synergy for Sustainable Pharmaceutical Degradation” in Water Research (Impact Factor: 12.8, CAS Q1, Nature Index journal). Associate Professor Qian Yiguang served as the first author, while Associate Professor Li Juying was the sole corresponding author. The findings break the reliance of traditional Fenton technology on acidic conditions, significantly reducing energy consumption and chemical reagent usage, thereby providing a new paradigm for low-carbon treatment of pharmaceutical wastewater.

Pharmaceutical pollutants represent a new category of contaminants drawing significant environmental concern, posing substantial potential threats to human health and ecological systems. The “difficult-to-degrade, persistent” nature of these emerging pharmaceutical pollutants has become a global challenge in water environment management. While traditional Fenton technology serves as an effective means for degrading such pollutants, its reliance on strong acids and high chemical consumption severely limits its practical application in wastewater treatment. Furthermore, single-strain-driven bio-Fenton systems struggle to address complex wastewater environments due to limited metabolic capacity and poor environmental adaptability. This study simulates the redox fluctuations found in natural water bodies to construct a “self-sustaining MFenton system” driven by indigenous functional microbial communities. This approach offers a novel solution to the issues of poor adaptability, high costs, and high energy consumption associated with current pharmaceutical new pollutant treatment technologies in aquatic environments.

This study constructs a nature-inspired, microbial community-driven, self-sustaining MFenton system that achieves highly efficient (>80%) degradation of pharmaceutical-like emerging pollutants under near-neutral conditions. Through alternating anaerobic-aerobic cycles, this MFenton system enables heterotrophic iron-reducing bacteria (key bacteria include Sporanaerobacter, Sedimentibacter, Clostridium, Petrimonas, and Actinomyces) to autonomously complete “Fe³⁺ reduction to Fe²⁺” (anaerobic phase) and “H₂O₂ generation” (aerobic phase), thereby continuously producing HO· in situ. Compared to conventional Fenton processes, this system achieves self-sustaining iron redox cycles through synergistic interactions among key microbial communities. It eliminates the need for pH adjustment, reduces energy consumption by over 75%, and requires no external chemical reagent addition, demonstrating excellent environmental adaptability and sustainability. This research redefines the application boundaries of microbially driven advanced oxidation technologies and provides mechanistic insights into engineering natural iron redox networks for pollutant removal in dynamic environments.

This study demonstrates for the first time that utilizing naturally enriched facultative anaerobic iron-reducing bacterial communities can establish a “self-sustaining microbial Fenton system,” achieving efficient degradation of pharmaceutical-derived emerging pollutants in near-neutral environments. Its core advantage lies in overcoming acidity constraints—eliminating the need for pH adjustment and enabling broad adaptability to natural aquatic environments. Through synergistic microbial community metabolism, it achieves continuous in situ production of Fe²⁺ and H₂O₂, thereby reducing energy consumption and chemical reagent usage. This technology not only offers a novel solution for pharmaceutical wastewater treatment but also deepens our understanding of the coupled mechanism of “microbes-iron redox cycle-pollutant degradation” in aquatic environments, laying the foundation for developing more low-carbon environmental remediation technologies.

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 42377025 and 41603121), and the Science Foundation Project of Wuhan Institute of Technology (No. K202261).

Original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2025.124724