Biology Department Seminar

Plants have been used for several years for the remediation of hazardous chemicals in the environment. During that time we have had some understood what they did with the hazardous material, but not necessarily how they did it. But as the science has progressed, and as new environmental challenges have emerged, there is an increasing need to expand our thoughts on how to use plants to meet these challenges. This presentation will include our use of genetic tools to understand how plants degrade ‘traditional’ pollutants such as trichloroethylene as well as the plant interactions with new environmental contaminants such as nanoparticles. We will also present work we have done to identify multiuse bioenergy plants that would be suitable for use in the southeast, and the use of endophytes to increase both degradation potential for environmental contaminants while increasing production of biomass. And finally, we will present how native biological and physical degradation pathways can be combined for the degradation of light sensitive compounds, and discuss ongoing work to develop novel sensors to identify plants that have been in contact with contaminants.