of Zn from Contaminated Soil

Population explosion in the last decades together with global industrialization has caused heavy-metal contamination of air, water and soil, resulting in diverse incurable effects on humans and on the stability of the ecosystem. Non-biodegradable heavy-metals can remain in the ecosystem and the threat associated with their bioaccumulation in food chains represents one of the major envi-ronmental and health problems of present day society. Several studies were carried out to under-stand the ecological effects of the heavy-metal Zn in soil-plant systems. Plants often have a zinc uptake that their systems cannot handle, due to the accumulation of zinc in soils. Of the several Zn toxicity symptoms, fatal are yield reduction, stunted growth, chlorosis, reduced chlorophyll syn-thesis and chloroplast degradation. Vigna unguiculata is an herbaceous, annual plant in the pea family Fabaceae. In the present study, an experiment was performed to evaluate the Zn phytoex-tracting ability of V. unguiculata under in vitro condition. We establish that V. unguiculata can up-take a considerable amount of the heavy-metal zinc and this phytoextraction property can be uti-lized in long run for the cleanup of zinc contaminated soil. To the best of our knowledge, this is th