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Phytoremediation: Plant-Based Pollution Cleanup

Over centuries, human activities have contaminated areas with heavy metals and organic pollutants, posing dangers to ecosystems, natural resources, and public health. Phytoremediation uses wild or genetically modified plants to extract a wide range of pollutants from soil. Genetic engineering can modify plants for improved metal uptake, transport, and storage. Compared to conventional remediation, phytoremediation is cheap after initial planting, carbon-dioxide neutral, and biomass can be used for energy; however, it is relatively slow.

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Sachin Harriram
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51 views1 page

Phytoremediation: Plant-Based Pollution Cleanup

Over centuries, human activities have contaminated areas with heavy metals and organic pollutants, posing dangers to ecosystems, natural resources, and public health. Phytoremediation uses wild or genetically modified plants to extract a wide range of pollutants from soil. Genetic engineering can modify plants for improved metal uptake, transport, and storage. Compared to conventional remediation, phytoremediation is cheap after initial planting, carbon-dioxide neutral, and biomass can be used for energy; however, it is relatively slow.

Uploaded by

Sachin Harriram
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Over centuries, human industrial, mining and military activities as well as farming and

waste practices have contaminated large areas of developed countries with high
concentrations of heavy metals and organic pollutants. In addition to their negative
effects on ecosystems and other natural resources, these sites pose a great danger to
public health, because pollutants can enter food through agricultural products or leach
into drinking water (EC, 2002; EEA, 2003).

Phytoremediation is the process that uses wild or genetically modified plants (GMPs) to
extract a wide range of heavy metals and organic pollutants from the soil.

The use of genetic engineering to modify plants for metal uptake, transport and
sequestration may open up new avenues for enhancing efficiency of phytoremediation.
Metal chelator, metal transporter, metallothionein (MT), and phytochelatin (PC) genes
have been transferred to plants for improved metal uptake and sequestration. have been
developed [ CITATION Sus05 \l 4105 ].
A. thaliana and tobacco expressing both bacterial origin Mer A and Mer B have the
potential to transform methyl-mercury into elemental mercury, subsequently release
them into atmosphere through a process of phytovolatilization [ CITATION Gar \l 4105 ] .
Transgenic Indian mustard (Brassica juncea) has been genetically engineered by
overexpressing five enzymes in the Se-assimilation pathway which enhance Selenium
uptake and potentiate to metabolise Selenium to volatalisable form.
Phytoextraction is a form of phytoremediation that exploits the process in which plants
absorb substances, particularly heavy metals, from the environment and store them in
their tissues.
Compared with conventional methods of soil remediation, the use of plants provides
several striking advantages. It is cheap: after planting, only marginal costs apply for
harvesting and field management, such as weed control. It is a carbon-dioxide neutral
technology: if the harvested biomass is burned, no additional carbon dioxide is released
into the atmosphere beyond what was originally assimilated by the plants during growth.
Phytoremediation is also a potentially profitable technology as the resulting biomass can
be used for heat and energy production in specialized facilities. A major disadvantage of
phytoremediation is its relatively slow pace, because it requires several years or even
decades to halve metal contamination in soil (McGrath & Zhao, 2003)

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