Plant Uptake and Transformation of Emerging Contaminants

Greg LeFevre (UIowa Environmental Engineering)

Plants are all around us and have been a strong synergy between ecology and environmental engineering for decades. Plant can interact with pollutants both by helping to clean up environmental contaminants or may serve as an exposure route to humans for contaminants that are present in the food supply. In this seminar, I will present our research that probes mechanistic understanding of plant uptake and transformation processes for emerging organic contaminants in green stormwater infrastructure as a remediation approach and recycled water for crop irrigation as a potential human exposure route. Our group employs lab and field-based studies to understand what types of emerging contaminants are likely to be taken up by plants, passive vs. active uptake mechanisms, the first discovery of plant excretion, product to parent reversion of conjugated phytometabolites in the rhizosphere, and in vitro digestion simulations to assess contaminant bioaccessibility within plant tissues. We use high-resolution mass spectrometry for metabolomics and products/pathways discovery to determine what contaminants transform within plants and following digestion, and how plants respond to contaminant exposure. We also employ computational chemistry modeling approaches to enhance apriori predictive power. Understanding how plants take up and transform contaminants will enable better contaminated site clean up as well as ensuring clean food and water supplies.