Title : What is the part of the microorganisms living in the rhizosphere of plants in reducing hazardousness in phytoremediation strategies for soils contaminated with toxic metals
Abstract:
Soil is of most importance for living organisms and for the sustainability of all forms of life on earth. Nevertheless, all over the world there is a considerable area of polluted soils, mainly due to anthropogenic activities. Heavy metals are, amid pollutants, contaminants of great hazardousness, as they are not degradable and persist in nature, being not only toxic to living beings but being also dangerously bioaccumulable in the food chains. Using traditional methods of soil remediation to minimize this problem can present itself as a very expensive and not so effective solution to preserve soil functions. The establishment of a vegetable cover which can stabilize and ultimately remove the contaminants (phytoremediation) may represent a better option for such brownfields. However, such strategy encompasses the necessity of investigation of the toxicity of the existing contamination on plants and naturally on possible forms of decreasing it. A possible way of reducing metal toxicity to plants involved in such type of strategies may be the inoculation with efficient microbes – aiming at improving not only soil quality and therefore crop yield, but also at increasing the persistence of the applied plant crops. This presentation describes more comprehensively these microorganisms and the mechanisms through witch this microbiota can assist plant surviving heavy metal toxicity in such polluted soils, while simultaneously allowing their recovery.
Audience Take Away:
This presentation will assist the audience to realise the advantages of using phytoremediation to stabilize an decontaminate metal polluted soils, and will increase the understanding of the role of plant associated microbiota on such remediation strategies, not only on soil health, but also on plant establishment and survival and on the pollutants availability and remediation.
