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Dyes and pigments utilized for colouring purposes by textile industries play a pivotal role in the accumulation of numerous toxic substances in an aquatic environment. This provokes a keen interest in the environmentalist in developing a novel sorbent material that could remove the organic pollutants from the waste effluent. In the current study, Lemna minor, a duckweed plant, acts as the low cost, eco-friendlier sorbent to remove the toxic acid blue 113 dye from the effluents. The characteristic traits of the dried biosorbent were analysed by scanning electron microscope to analyse the porous and rough exterior surface, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy reveal the presence of specific entities such as amine, hydroxyl, carboxyl and alkyl groups and gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy for the presence of numerous polyphenolic compounds. Optimization was done by response surface methodology to study their potential in the adsorption capacity of the adsorbent. The removal efficiency of 98.5% was attained in the batch study at optimized parameters of contact time (40 min), pH (4.0), temperature (40 °C) and concentration of sorbent (1 g). The reaction mechanism was evaluated with the kinetics and isotherm studies. Kinetics study includes pseudo-first-order, pseudo-second-order, Elovich and intra-particle diffusion, and the isotherm study includes Langmuir, Freundlich, Langmuir–Freundlich and Temkin isotherm models. The system follows the pseudo-second-order kinetics model, Langmuir and Langmuir–Freundlich isotherm model with the maximum sorption capacity of 395.7 mg/g. Thermodynamic studies were evaluated to determine the spontaneous and endothermic nature of the reaction.

In this study, ethanolic extract of Zea maysL was utilized against isolated urinary tract infection causing bacteria and vegetable spoilage causing fungi and also used to analyze anticancer activity. The antimicrobial activity of ethanol extracts of corn silk was determined by the agar well diffusion method against UTI pathogens. The most effective antibacterial activity of ethanol corn silk extract was 900 μg. The most effective antifungal activity of ethanol corn silk extract was found against Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavusand Aspergillus brasiliensis. The fungicidal concentration has been controlled to a minimum extent at 2mg/20ml for all isolated fungi. It showed 75 % nitric oxide inhibition activity and 67 %. amylase promoting activity. GC-MS analysis showed several bio active compounds with antimicrobial, antioxidant, anticancer activities etc.