- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development3 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.3 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections5 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Plant "eats" heavy metal
First, TPP hates any science "news" article that says plants "eat" anything. What a stupid thing to say. Plants don't "eat" carbon dioxide either although they do absorb it. That being said, here's an otherwise interesting article about heavy metal accumulation in a plant. Heavy metal accumulation in plants is nothing new; they all basically do it because for some reason plants can't get rid of a heavy metal (plants don't "crap" either) once they absorb it. Now heavy metals are toxic, and plants can absorb them in non-toxic amounts, transport them across membranes and cytoplasm, and then accumulate them inside vacuoles, a handy compartment where it can accumulate in toxic amounts. This is part of a phenomenon called biological magnification, and this is why heavy metal pollution and the recycling of sewage sludge can be a problem. At any rate some plants are hyper-accumulators and they can take up and accumulate a whole bundle bunch of heavy metal to the point where the plant is quite toxic although unaffected itself. In the western USA some plants accumulate selenium from certain types of soils, and cattle grazing on these heavy metal accumulators develop an intoxication called "blind staggers". The plant in this story accumulates nickel to such a level that it makes up about 2% of the biomass of the plant (the amount of stuff left after removing water). Wow, talk about a wooden nickel! To put that in scientific terms, it's a lot. The idea has been around for some time that such plants might allow you to bio-mine certain elements that are too diffuse to be obtained through physical methods, or perhaps to remove dangerous heavy metals from a polluted area so they can be put where exactly? TPP has always been unclear on this last point. This is why heavy metal pollution is a bad thing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It could either be stored (at a much lower volume than the contaminated soil) or the metal could be extracted and sent on for further refining. You certainly wouldn't want to just leave them there.
Post a Comment