Exoelectrogens Leading to Precise Reduction of Graphene Oxide by Flexibly Switching Their Environment during Respiration

Reduced graphene oxide (RGO) has been prepared by a simple, cost-effective, and green route. In this work, graphene oxide (GO) has been reduced using Gram-negative facultative anaerobe S. dysenteriae, having exogenic properties of electron transfer via electron shuttling. Apparently, different concentrations of GO were successfully reduced with almost complete mass recovery. An effective role of lipopolysaccharide has been observed while comparing RGO reduced by S. dysenteriae and S. aureus. It was observed that the absence of lipopolysaccharide in Gram-positive S. aureus leads to a disrupted cell wall and that S.aureus could not survive in the presence of GO, leading to poor and inefficient reduction of GO, as shown in our results. However, S. dysenteriae having an outer lipopolysaccharide layer on its cell membrane reduced GO efficiently and the reduction process was extracellular for it. RGO prepared in our work has been characterized by X-ray diffraction, zeta potential, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy techniques, and the results were found to be in good agreement with those of chemically reduced GO. As agglomeration of RGO is the major issue to overcome while chemically reducing GO, we observed that RGO prepared by a bacterial route in our work has zeta potential value of -26.62 mV, good enough to avoid restacking of RGO. The role of exoelectrogens in electron transfer in the extracellular space has been depicted. Toxin released extracellularly during the process paves the way for reduction of GO due to its affinity towards oxygen.