Abstract
Mechanisms of main methods for removing hazardous heavy metal from contaminated soils are summarized with an emphasis on phytoremediation aspects. Applying plants and microbes is preferred because of their cost-effectiveness, environmental friendliness, and fewer side-effects. In the future, the application of genetic engineering and cell engineering to create an expected species would become popular. However, a concomitant and latent danger of genetic pollution is concerned by a few persons. To cope with this potential harm, several suggestions are put forward including choosing self-pollinated plants, creating infertile polyploid species, and carefully selecting easy-controlled microbe species. The authors point out that current investigation of noncrop hyperaccumulators is of little significance in application. Pragmatic development in the future should be crop hyperaccumulators (termed as “cropaccumulators”) by transgenic or symbiotic approach. Considering that no effective plan has been put forward by others about concrete steps of applying a hyperaccumulator to practice, the authors bring forward a set of universal procedures, which is novel, tentative, and adaptive to evaluate hyperaccumulators’ feasibility before large-scale commercialization.
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Acknowledgements
This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41001137), The Science and Technology Development Plan of Shandong Province (2010GSF10208), The Science and Technology Development Plan of Yantai City (20102450), One Hundred-Talent Plan of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams, the Important Direction Project of CAS (KZCX2-YW-JC203) and CAS Young Scientists Fellowship (2009Y2B211).
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Hongbo, S., Liye, C., Gang, X., Kun, Y., Lihua, Z., Junna, S. (2011). Progress in Phytoremediating Heavy-Metal Contaminated Soils. In: Sherameti, I., Varma, A. (eds) Detoxification of Heavy Metals. Soil Biology, vol 30. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21408-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21408-0_4
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