Simultaneous removal of nitrate and pesticides from contaminated groundwater using aerobic granular biomass technology Muñoz Palazón, Barbara Hurtado Martínez, Miguel Rosa Masegosa, Aurora González López, Jesús Juan González Martínez, Alejandro Pesticides Nitrate Contaminated groundwater Aerobic granular technology Active microbial community Total microbial community Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in the online version at doi:10.1016/j.jece.2023.109527 Aerobic Granular Biomass (AGB) technology is widely used for urban and industrial wastewater treatment, however, its application in groundwater remediation, is practically unknown. A mixture of carbendazim, simazine, and diuron were amended to the nitrate-polluted synthetic groundwater at increasing concentrations to validate the ability of technology to remove both kind of pollutants, pesticides and nitrate which are commonly found in the water resources. The nitrate removal was a success with values below 0.010 g⋅L-1. The increased concentration of pesticides in the influent did not distort the pattern observed for pesticide removal. Carbendazim was almost completely eliminated, followed by simazine elimination, while diuron showed adsorption-desorption patterns during experimentation. The addition of pesticides had a drastic effect on the basal community conducted by proliferation of Hyphomicrobium and Dokdonella. The pesticide compounds had a negative effect on number of copies for fungal population, while archaeal population was unharmed, according to qPCR results. Denitrifying bacteria need 70 days as acclimatization period for achieving activity values as initial inoculum. The results obtained have shown for the first time the capacity of AGB system to treat groundwater polluted with nitrate and pesticide using low carbon load. Therefore, the results suggested the potential application of AGB technology for the purification of groundwater polluted with both nitrates and pesticides 2023-06-27T08:41:21Z 2023-06-27T08:41:21Z 2023-02-18 journal article B. Muñoz-Palazon et al. Simultaneous removal of nitrate and pesticides from contaminated groundwater using aerobic granular biomass technology. Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering 11 (2023) 109527[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jece.2023.109527] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/82864 10.1016/j.jece.2023.109527 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional