Metal-devouring plant hero: How do hyperaccumulating plants extract metals from contaminated soil?

Congratulations Renying! Look forward to finding out how this project unfolds in real time!

It's very good question, we had found the plants growed better under low concentration Cd stress. But we didn't know why it need Cd iron. We want ti found how the plant uptake Cd iron from soil to root, and then transport to stem and leafy, and how to sequestration in vcs.

Talking to some friends, they wanted to know why this plants would have evolved to accumulate the metal. Do they have a biological need for the metal? Also, are the metals being sucked through transporters? What do you expect to find?

You can find the results in the paper: Zhang J, Zhang M, Shohag MJI et al. Enhanced expression of SaHMA3 plays critical roles in Cd hyperaccumulation and hypertolerance in Cd hyperaccumulator Sedum alfredii Hance[J]. Planta, 2015: 1-13. According to the different of soil pollution, it need 5-10years.

hyperaccumulation ecotype Sedum can accumulate 9000 μg · g-1 Fresh Weight of Cd and 29000 μg · g-1 Fresh Weight of Zn in stem without obvious symptoms of poisoning

Just exactly how "superpowered" are these plants? How much metal can it remove?

"Preliminary surveys have shown these to be small genomes, the genome size of the hyperaccumulating ecotype of Sedum alfredii is 189 megabase, and the non-accumulating species is 240 megabase. " How recenly did they diverge? I imagine it could be hard to dig out a few key differences among the vast majority of irrelevant ones if they are not very close.

They are about 500 species plants can accumulator different heavy metal In the world, and few plants can accumulator Cd, for I know, just 5-7 species plants.

Are there a lot of plants with bioremediation potential?