United Kingdom
September 8, 2008
Oil seed rape grown for biofuel in
Ireland could help clean up contaminated soils, scientists heard
today (Wednesday 10 September 2008) at the
Society for General Microbiology's
Autumn meeting being held this week at Trinity College, Dublin.
Using plants to help clean up heavily polluted soils has been
successfully tested for many years and shown to be a cheap and
environmentally friendly way to clear heavy metals such as
arsenic, copper, zinc and chromium from contaminated land. The
main problem with the method has been the amount of time it
takes to grow successive crops of plants to clean up an area.
Now scientists may have come up with a solution by combining
heavy metal tolerant bacteria with plants used to make biofuels
such as oil seed rape.
"We discovered that inoculating the plants with metal resistant
bacteria provided them with sufficient protection that their
seeds germinated better and their growth was enhanced. The plant
leaves accumulate the metals, the bacteria deal with the
contamination, and the plants seem to benefit from some of their
activity," says Olivia Odhiambo from the Institute of
Technology, Carlow, Ireland.
Oilseed rape is a member of the Brassica family, which also
includes cabbages and Brussels sprouts. It is well suited to
Irish growing conditions and is already widely grown by farmers
for biodiesel production.
"As some of the bacterial strains we tested are showing enhanced
growth properties in the crop, this also means greater plant
production and more biodiesel," says Olivia Odhiambo. "This is
good news for owners of land that cannot currently be used for
food plants due to heavy metal contamination. However, this
technology could also have much wider implications in improving
biofuel crop production nationally and internationally by simply
helping farmers grow more fuel per hectare."
The scientists have looked at two types of metal tolerant
bacteria which colonise the leaves of the oil seed rape plants
and one metal tolerant type that lives in the roots of other
brassicas and found that all three were successful in promoting
the plant growth, although they did show different tolerances to
different heavy metals. The Carlow team now hopes to extend
their study to include other commercial biofuel plants and
different strains of metal resistant |
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