The engineered phytoremediation of ionic and methylmercury pollution 70054yr.2000.doc

Our long-term objective is to enable highly productive plant species to extract, resist, detoxify, and/or sequester toxic heavy metal pollutants (Meagher, 2000). We have focused our research on the phytoremediation of soil and water-borne ionic and organic mercury (Meagher and Rugh, 1996; Meagher et al., 2000). Mercury pollution is a serious world-wide problem affecting the health of human and wild-life populations. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory have sites with significant levels of mercury contamination that could be cleaned by applying the scientific discoveries and new phytoremediation technologies described in this proposal. In the near future, the experience gained through engineering plants that hyperaccumulate mercury, can be applied to extraction or accumulation of various toxic heavy metal and radionuclide contaminates at dozens of DOE sites