Development of antibiotic carriers by materials based marine wastes

Posidonia oceanica is an endemic sea grass in the Mediterranean Sea. It falls off its leaves seasonally. The dead leaves accumulated on the beaches are considered as marine wastes in Turkey and they are collected and burned. The adsorption of tetracycline, one of the model antibiotics, by using adsorbents obtained from dead leaves of P. oceanica was studied in this study. The adsorption data were evaluated through both classical (kinetics, isotherm, thermodynamics) and a modern method, artificial neural network (ANN). pH, antibiotic concentration, temperature, shaking rate, adsorbent amount, ionic strength and volume of solution were selected as input parameters in ANN modeling studies. Adsorption amount was defined as output value. According to classical evaluation results, pseudo-second order kinetic and Langmuir isotherm were well in line with kinetic and isotherm of the experimental data, respectively. Thermodynamics parameters such as entropy, enthalpy and Gibbs Free Energy were also studied in the study. In the ANN modeling, the best back propagation algorithm, optimum number of hidden neuron and optimum training:validation:testing ratio were found as Bayesian Regulation, 16 and 70:10:20, respectively. After ANN modeling, the results of sensitivity analysis reveal that the determination coefficients were found over than 0.99. In conclusion, the accumulated sea grass based marine waste can be used in the development of high performance adsorbents for environmental pollutants. However, it is not to forgetten that P.oceanica is an endangered species; therefore, only dead leaves accumulated in recreational area should be collected and evaluated.