Sulfur K-edge XANES spectroscopy as a tool for understanding sulfur chemical state in anaerobic granular sludge

Sulfur is an essential biological element, yet its biochemistry in anaerobic biofilm is poorly understood because there are few tools for studying this element in biological systems. X-ray absorption spectroscopy provides a unique approach to determining the chemical speciation of sulfur in intact biological samples. When treating sulfate containing wastewaters in full scale up-flow anaerobic sludge bed bioreactors, microbial activity forms biofilms, consisting of a complex mixture of cells and associated extracellular substances as well as undefined inorganic precipitates. In addition to the anaerobic sludges, a large variety of model compounds of S (esp. sulfides) were investigated to find consistencies in the XANES that were used to model each valence state of S. The results confirmed that attributing a specific valence to most sulfides is impossible as we measured a continuum of edge shifts from sulfur -2 to -1, depending on the electronic structure of S in the probed sulfides. In the sludges, various sulfur hot spots were probed for speciation, despite photo-reduction was sometimes a problem. First, we index the main features of complex K-edge XANES spectra for S2--type units and sulfate units. Organic sulfur compounds were also shown to contribute significantly to the sulfur species present in some anaerobic granular sludge.