Addressing the critical issue of water pollution, this review article emphasizes the need to remove hazardous dyes and phenolic compounds from wastewater. These pollutants pose severe risks due to their toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic properties. The study explores various techniques for the remediation of organic contaminants from wastewater, including an enzymatic approach. A significant challenge in enzymatic wastewater treatment is the loss of enzyme activity and difficulty in recovery post-treatment. To mitigate these issues, this review examines the strategy of immobilizing enzymes on newly developed nanostructured materials like graphene, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). These materials offer high surface areas, excellent porosity, and ample anchoring sites for effective enzyme immobilization. The review evaluates recent research on enzyme immobilization on these supports and their applications in biocatalytic nanoparticles. It also analyzes the impact of operational factors (e.g., time, pH, and temperature) on dye and phenolic compound removal from wastewater using these enzymes. Despite promising outcomes, this review acknowledges the challenges for large-scale implementation and offers recommendations for future research to tackle these obstacles. This review concludes by suggesting that enzyme immobilization on these emerging materials could present a sustainable, environmentally friendly solution to the escalating water pollution crisis.

The behavior of ionizable surfactants at oil/water interfaces is central to applications from emulsification to liquid-liquid extraction, yet predictive control remains a challenge. Current models often decouple interfacial adsorption from the underlying acid-base chemistry that inevitably will influence surfactant availability. Here, we establish a unified thermodynamic framework demonstrating that interfacial phenomena are controlled by speciation-gated mass transfer. Using a homologous series of linear carboxylic acids (C5-C16), we combine dynamic interfacial tension measurements with kinetic phenotyping and a phase-resolved speciation/partitioning model to show that the flux of surface-active species is gated by the acidbase equilibrium. Two kinetic regimes emerge across the series: long-chain acids relax monotonically toward equilibrium, whereas short-chain acids display pronounced non-monotonic behavior, consistent with initial interfacial activity followed by depletion through organic-toaqueous transfer and dissociation in water. Our framework, which explicitly couples partitioning (logP) and dissociation (pKa) parameters, quantitatively predicts the time-dependent interfacial tension, including non-monotonic behavior driven by mass transfer, and the corresponding pH control of the aqueous phase. The model predicts interfacial-tension dynamics and captures the pH switching gate at which the system switches from oil-favored to water-favored behavior. We validate these predictions across concentrations, pHs, and chain lengths, as well as in weak bases (decylamine). This work transforms the design of responsive liquid-liquid interfaces from empirical trial-and-error to a predictive, thermodynamically guided approach, in which pH and molecular structure (pKa and logP) serve as explicit design levers to control interfacial energy and dynamics. Final version: https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.6c04456