Mutant Plants Suck Toxic TNT (Yes, That TNT) Out of Soil
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/mutant-plants-suck-toxic-tnt-yes-tnt-soil/
You love explosions, I love explosions, everybody loves explosions. Well…explosions where nobody gets hurt and nothing important gets blown up. Take some mortars into a field, drop a couple bombs on an empty prairie, play target practice with a barrel of TNT in the middle of a serene pasture. What’s the harm?
The harm is your old pal, contamination. How could you have forgotten about contamination, right? In hindsight, it’s obvious, considering that a
TNT-based explosive usually leaves about 2 percent of the material uncombusted, and TNT can cause serious health problems in humans and animals. Getting the stuff out of the soil is a pain, and typically calls for a lot of money and a lot of backhoes. But scientists have figured out how to breed some weeds with a genetically enhanced means of sucking TNT out of the soil. This approach would be considerably cheaper, and require practically zero backhoes.
There is a lot more TNT in the world than you’d probably guess. The US military blows up TNT-based explosives on combined weapons testing acreage that’s larger than the state of Indiana—38,600 square miles where they blow stuff up on the regular. Besides that, thousands of sites across the world are contaminated with residual TNT from weapons dropped in past conflicts. And
TNT is nasty stuff. In humans, it causes blood thinning, liver disfunction, and cancer. It’s toxic to all kinds of animals, and can mess with soil microbes in a major way. “So the military has a pressing need to reduce pollutants on their sites,” says Neil Bruce, a plant geneticist at the University of York in the UK who—surprise!—is working on ways to address that pressing issue using—surprise!!!—plants.
For more than a decade, Bruce has been breeding and engineering plants for soil remediation. “They take the TNT up into their cells and transform it so they can lock it up into their cell walls,” says Bruce. The real problem is plants can only suck up so much of the stuff before it becomes very toxic to them. So Bruce and his lab started mucking around in plant DNA, looking for a gene that would make it easier for plants to break stuff down....
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