well at least this study had no success with chelating mercury using bacteria
Abstract
Heavy metal chelation property of exopolysaccharide produced by Enterobacter cloaceae, a marine bacterium, isolated from the West Coast of India, is reported in this paper. The exopolysaccharide demonstrated excellent chelating properties with respect to cadmium (65%) followed by copper (20%) and cobalt (8%) at 100 mg/l heavy metal concentration. However, it could not chelatemercury. A comparative study of the percentage biosorption of the above mentioned metals is presented here.