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Mining Metals Using Plants and Trees?
elroySF writes "An MIT Technology Review article says "...Scientists reported Monday that they have bioengineered a plant capable of absorbing arsenic from soil and sequenced the complete set of genes for a microbe that can remove heavy metals from water." It goes on to say "...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil."
" We had a story about this a while back.
Can you imagine you walk into an arsenic mine that looks like a peach orchard and decide to sample the goods?
It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
Also, some plants already concentrate arsenic in their seeds. (It's been a while since I heard this, but I seem to recall it's either apples or apricots.)
Oh yeah. First post!
Oh, go on, check out my job.
It's the choice of an old and tired generation!
Chew on this!
Feeling down? Don't stick around! Genetically Engineered Arsenic Tobacco - Jack Kervorkian Chew!
oh I forgot...
2. ???
3. Profit!
What I would like to know is how they plan to get the base minerals, considering soils have tyically minimal mineralization and the elements tend to be in very low concentrations.
I would think that this would only work for rare earth elements and the like, not so good for base metals.
Still, after seeing what mining does to the landscape, anything is better.
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
Yes, you pump arsenic from a disposal site, but the arsenic in that waste will probably be low concentration (just ppm in solids is considered bad).
Imagine that the plant sucks up *all* the arsenic from the soil, and *just* the arsenic. Thousands of tons of crap, which contain a few hundred pounds of arsenic, all of which goes into leaves. You then harvest the plants, put them into compost, shovel out a nice barrel full of arsenic into a secured container for burial, and have your nice thousands of tons of crap cleaned of arsenic. All the arsenic is still there, it's just become a smaller, more manageable problem.
Arsenic is an *element* (although what most people consider arsenic is Arsenolite, As2O3. Arsenic as As metal is pretty rare to find naturally), until you get that whole alchemy thing going and you transmute it into iron, there are no decent forms of arsenic that are completely safe. Everything is about concentration and containment.
"...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil." That demonstrates why some people calling themselves 'scientists' should stick to their fields. Sucking up miniscule amounts of metals with plants would only deplete the 'crustal abundance' of minerals within the narrow range of plant roots, and the average American requires over 45,000 pounds of newly-mined minerals every year. I work in the mineral industry, and I am a scientist. This smells like a grant proposal that got by someone. Suckers!
Quite the reverse, I am quite positive these species have been engineered to clean landfills of heavy metals that are otherwise very difficult to extract. There is no other direct reason to engineer plants other than the mining benefit. The mining benefit is very likely commercially, but definately politically, secondary to cleaning (often suburban) areas of waste.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
The topic of this article is highly misleading. One would think plants were capable of mining for metals like iron, copper or various mined good, while the real use is cleaning up the soil from any heavy-metal contamination, such as the arsenic example. A more practical use in the local neighbohrhood for this would be to clean the ground around older gas stations or clean the ground of heavy-metals where there used to be a steel mill.
Hate me!
The first group of researchers added a gene from the E. coli bacteria and one from soybeans to make Arabidopsis thaliana, a distant relative of cabbage, develop its taste for arsenic.... The plant efficiently pumps arsenic from the soil and stores it in its leaves, where it can be easily harvested and disposed of.
Oh, sure, as if cabbage didn't taste bad enough already....
This is nothing new. Many companies have been doing this for a very long time.
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Here is a
http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/09/3
Ocen Arks International:
http://www.oceanarks.org/LM/Frame
a decent Wired.com article:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,
also see: http://www.berea.edu/sens/living_machine.htm
The Buckminster Fuller Institute
http://www.bfi.org/Trimtab/fall00/living_machin
This UK company
http://www.ltluk.com/
a Battelle Enviro Update article
http://www.battelle.org/Environment/publ
An article from HUD
http://www.hud.gov/local/boi/ie100601.html
The notice from the 1993 confrence on living machines:
http://www.ibiblio.org/london/agriculture/biore
Some info from LSU
http://www.biology.lsu.edu/webfac/cramcharan
Rockbourne Enviro
http://www.rockbourne.net/WastewaterTreat
Korte Organica
http://www.korte.hu/technologies/living_machine
This Time.com article
http://www.time.com/time/reports/environ
Riddle me this batman, which of these two cases presents a harder clean-up problem: 100 kg of lead powdered into a fine dust and bound to the soil as various metalic salts, or a 100 kg brick of lead? The problem that is trying to be addressed here is large-scale soil contamination, where the toxic compounds are distributed and diffuse. The original title to this slashdot story (in the grand slashdot tradition) is completely misleading about the goals here, a better title would have been something like "Using plants to concentrate soil contamination for further processing" but that did not have the same tabloid appeal I guess.
At some point someone should to a bit of examination of past slashdot stories and give the rest of us a bit of feedback on which slashdot editors actually read the articles they are linking to and have the brain cells necessary to understand the content of these links. While I dispair for the future any of the slashdot editors have in fields related to science and technology, they can always fall back to a career with the Weekly World News...