Mercury accumulation by plants depending on its speciation in growing substrate

Olga V. Shuvaeva^1,2, PhD, Maria A. Gustaytis^2,3, Anastasia Pohorukova^1,2

¹Nikolaev Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, Russia

²Novosibirsk State University, Russia

³Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Russia

Abstract: Despite the fact that phytotechnologies are used rather intensively in world practice both for cleaning contaminated areas and for extracting valuable components, the main attention is usually focused on their practical application, and to a lesser extent  touches upon scientific problems focused on the study and understanding of the essence of bioaccumulation phenomenon. Unfortunately the relationship between the chemical form of the element in substrate and the efficiency of its extraction by plants is not discussed in the literature. To clarify the question the present work was concentrated in the study of the dependence mercury accumulation efficiency by plants in natural and man-made environments on its chemical form. The speciation of mercury as well as of the products of its transformation in growing substrate was performed using the hyphenation of thermal release technique with electro thermal atomic absorption detection (TR-ETA-AAS) which were previously developed by the authors [1].  The maim advantage of this approach consists in direct analysis of the solid environmental samples (soils, plants etc.) without prior dissolving. As a result it was shown that a series of mercury extractability depending on the initially introduced species can be represented as the following: CH3Hg+ > Hg2+ > HgS.  Moreover, it was also found that the chemical forms of mercury in substrate undergo to transformation in time.

Audience Take Away:

• The audience will get a new fundamental knowledge concerning phytoextraction phenomena
• This will attract the audience’s attention  to the problem of environmental pollution by industrial waste
• This will allow evaluating phytotechnologies as a powerful tool to clean the Environment.

Olga V. Shuvaeva, Dr. of Sci., Leading Researcher at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, is experienced in analytical and environmental chemistry, combines research work at the Institute with teaching as a professor at Novosibirsk State University (Faculty of Natural Sciences, Analytical Chemistry Chair). She has about 80 publications in reputed journals: Atmospheric Research, Science of the total Environment, Chemosphere, International Journal of Phytoremediation, Analytical Sciences, Dalton Transactions, Anal. Chim.  Acta, Electrophoresis, Journal of Analytical chemistry (Rus) et al.