Transgenic Plants for Phytoremediation

Abstract

Phytoremediation is a green, sustainable and promising solution to problems of environmental contamination. It entails the use of plants for uptake, sequestration, detoxification or volatilization of inorganic and organic pollutants from soils, water, sediments and possibly air. Phytoremediation was born from the observation that plants possessed physiological properties useful for environmental remediation. This was shortly followed by the application of breeding techniques and artificial selection to genetically improve some of the more promising and interesting species. Now, after nearly 20 years of research, transgenic plants for phytoremediation have been produced, but none have reached commercial existence. Three main approaches have been developed: (1) transformation with genes from other organisms (mammals, bacteria, etc.); (2) transformation with genes from other plant species; and (3) overexpression of genes from the same plant species. Many encouraging results have been reported, even though in some instances results have been contrary to expectations. This review will illustrate the main examples with a critical discussion of what we have learnt from them.

KEY WORDS:

• genomics
• GMOs
• inorganic and organic contaminants
• patents
• pyramidization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge financial assistance from University of Parma local funding and from the Italian Ministry of University and Research through PRIN projects. They also acknowledge the support of COST Action 859. The authors regret that it was not possible to cite all papers which have been collected in the database.