The long term goal of the funded research is to understand how heavy metals are taken up from the soil and translocated throughout the plant. The potential application of this research is to create plants with better heavy metal uptake systems and thereby improve the ability of these plants to help clean up toxic metals from soils. A rate limiting step is using plant for bioremediation is the normally poor capacity of plants to concentrate toxic metals. Our interest in metal ion transport systems includes those for essential mineral nutrients such as molybdenum, copper, iron, manganese, as well as toxic metals such as cerium, mercury, cesium, cadmium, arsenic and selenium. Understanding the pathways by which toxic metals accumulate in plants will enable the engineering of plants to exclude toxic metals and create healthier food sources, or to extract toxic metals from the soil as a strategy to clean up polluted lands and water.
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