A rare central Queensland plant could be the environmentally friendly answer to nickel mining and help clean up metal-rich soils.
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| A rare central Queensland plant could be the environmentally friendly answer to nickel mining and help clean up metal-rich soils. |
Dr Naveen Bhatia, an ANSTO Australian Synchrotron Research Program Fellow who is studying the plant, said Stackhousia tryonii sucks up the deadly metal, accumulating pure nickel in up to four per cent of its dry leaf weight.
“We also know that once Stackhousia absorbs the nickel, the roots detoxify it and the soil gets cleaned at the same time,” Dr Bhatia explained. “This means that these special plants could be used to remove toxic waste from polluted soil around mine dumps and smelters.
“My work complements overseas scientists experimenting with similar plants, known as hyperaccumulators, in a bid to find species suitable for growth and harvesting in ore-rich soil so the metals can be extracted from their leaves and stems,” he said.
The process is known as phytomining and studies suggest that the process could be economically and environmentally viable.
Dr Bhatia, who has worked on the Stackhousia species for the past six years, will leave for the United States at the end of July to carry out further experiments on the plant using a powerful X-ray machine called a synchrotron.
The aim of the experiments is to find out more about how the plant ingests the metal and copes with it.
“If we can isolate the genes that enable the plant to absorb metals and then insert them into a fast growing species, these can then be grown in soil contaminated with heavy metals to clean it up and make it safe for human and animal use.”
The Queensland plant, which Dr Bhatia says looks like a bunch of stems with narrow leaves, was discovered in 1990 by three scientists from Australia and New Zealand2 who were looking specifically for hyperaccumulators of nickel, following discoveries of similar plants overseas. In all there are about 450 plant species of this type world-wide.
Later in the year Dr Bhatia will return to the United States to study the Python Tree, an Australian rainforest species that absorbs manganese, and a Congolese plant that absorbs copper and cobalt.
Published: 15/06/2005