(NAS Colloquium) Plants and Population Is There Time? (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Use of plant roots for phytoremediation and molecular farming
Use of plant roots for phytoremediation and molecular farming
Pages 5973-5977
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From page 5973... ...
These root-based technologies include metal phytoextraction, a subset of phytoremediation, which uses plants to remove toxic heavy metals from soil; and rhizosecretion, a subset of molecular farming, which relies on the ability of plant roots to exude valuable compounds. Both technologies exploit plants' innate biological mechanisms for human benefit.
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From page 5974... ...
The unexplored chemical diversity of root exudates is an obvious place to search for novel biologically active compounds including antimicrobials. Our biochemical analysis of root exudates from 120 plant species can be summarized as follows: (i)
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From page 5975... ...
Extracts of plant material haphazardly collected in various places around the world are eventually acquired by pharmaceutical companies, which put them through sophisticated high-throughput screens that use an increasing array of molecular targets. This primitive prospecting process does not provide a reliable and reproducible source of natural products that can be easily resupplied after a novel activity is found.
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From page 5976... ...
Tissue culture-based production of natural products, often combined with elicitation, is one of the recently developed strategies for "increasing the size of the needle in the haystack." However, plant tissue cultures are expensive, slow growing, and relatively deficient of secondary metabolites, presumably because of their nondifferentiated nature. Rhizosecretion, on the other hand, may produce a more costeffective and diverse source of chemical compound mixtures for the identification of novel biologically active compounds.
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From page 5977... ...
Elemental mercury produced in transgenic plants is much less toxic than ionic mercury and can be volatilized from transgenic plants in a process termed phytovolatilization, which is related to phytoextraction. The future challenge for rhizosecretion lies in the successful development of effective and safe pharmaceuticals from the collection of biologically active lead molecules secreted by the roots, and in large-scale, cost-effective manufacturing of recombinant proteins.
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