Phytoremediation of Ionic and Methyl Mercury Pollution

Meagher, Richard B.

Genetics Department University of Georgia Athens, CA (United States)

关键词: Methylmercury;    Genes;    Pollution;    59 Basic Biological Sciences;    Mercury;   

DOI  :  10.2172/833504
RP-ID  :  EMSP-70054--2003
RP-ID  :  FG07-99ER20257
RP-ID  :  833504

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

Our long-term objective is to enable highly productive plant species to extract, resist, detoxify, and/or sequester toxic organic and heavy metal pollutants by applying scientific strategies and technologies from a rapidly developing field called phytoremediation. The phytoremediation of toxic elemental and organic pollutants employs a variety of different approaches (Meagher, 2000). Our current specific objectives are to use transgenic plants to control the chemical species, electrochemical state, transport, and aboveground binding of mercury to (a) prevent methylmercury from entering the food-chain, (b) remove mercury from polluted sites, and (c) hyperaccumulate mercury in aboveground tissues for later harvest and waste disposal. Various parts of this strategy are being critically tested by examining different genes in model plants and field species and comparing the results to control plants, as we reviewed previously (Meagher et al., 2000; Rugh et al., 2000). A positive spin-off from this work on mercury has been a strategy for the phytoremediation of arsenic (Dhankher et al., 2002) and cadmium (Dhankher et al., 2003).