Fun with Science Club®


			Plants with special genes can clean the soil. Beth Tyler 06.01.01 Due to pollution from humans, metals like aluminum and mercury get into the soil. These metals are harmful to the environment and often prevent plants from growing there. However, geneticists have found a way to get some of the metals out of the soil. They have identified genes in some organisms that absorb certain metals. They can take a gene that absorbs a metal out of an organism’s cell, multiply it, and then put it into a plant’s DNA. These special plants are planted in soil with metal pollution, where they absorb the metal from the soil. While it sounds like science fiction, this kind of genetic engineering is helping clean metals out of the soil. Once the plants have grown and contain the metals, they can be picked and safely burned to ashes.


			Moffat, Anne Simon. 1999. Engineering plants to cope with metals. Science 285: 369-370.