Sowing Hope: Unravelling Sunflowers’ Amazing Power to Clean Up Polluted Soil
As a result of their amazing ability to clean up contaminated soil, sunflowers have become very helpful after nuclear tragedies. These plants, which are called hyperaccumulators, can take harmful heavy metals from the ground, which makes them very important for restoring soil. At both Chernobyl and Fukushima, where terrible nuclear accidents happened, sunflower fields were planted as part of a plan to clean up the areas and safely get rid of the plants that were grown there.
Catie Kitrinos, an incoming fourth-year student researcher at U.Va., is interested in the sunflower because of its amazing ability to heal the environment. Catie, from Springfield, is a biology and anthropology major who has been given the Harrison Undergraduate Research Award to study how sunflowers’ genes vary. Her goal is to map the plant’s ability to absorb heavy metals across its genome. This is a very important project that could help us figure out how to best use sunflowers to clean up the world.
Sunflowers, which are also called “phytoremediators,” aren’t the only plants that can clean up, but their big size makes them more effective. Catie will help plant almost 1,700 sunflowers and test between 250 and 280 genotypes over the next year in order to reach her study goals. This detailed genetic mapping will include 85 to 90 percent of the sunflower genome. This will help scientists find the best sunflower breed for cleaning up the environment.
Catie is currently testing how well sunflowers absorb zinc and then copper, which are elements that can be found in fertilisers, pollution, and waste. Benjamin Blackman, an assistant professor of biology, is her teaching mentor for this project. He talks about how sunflowers can take up a lot of metals from the soil because they can hyperaccumulate. Traditional methods of cleaning dirt, like digging, are more expensive and damage more land than phytoremediation, the process by which plants like sunflowers take in and store pollutants.
Notably, the types of sunflower that don’t absorb metals are just as important, especially for customers. Sunflowers are used a lot in agriculture to make things like sunflower oil, seeds, and skin care goods. To make sure that the plants for sale are healthy, it is important to find genotypes that can easily absorb poisons while still being resistant to heavy metals in the soil, such as salt deposits.
At the moment, Catie and her team are taking care of a variety of sunflowers in the garden of the biology department. As part of their project, they are adding different amounts of zinc to the soil, letting the plants grow for four weeks, and then testing them in the lab. Catie uses a photospectrometer to measure how much metal the plant takes in and how the metals are distributed in different parts of the plant, like the root, stem, or leaf. Figuring out the best genotype for farming requires knowing how the metals are distributed in the plant, since some placements may stop photosynthesis and growth.
Catie’s study has been well-funded thanks to the Harrison grant and the Miller Agricultural Fund. These grants and funds have paid for things like zinc sulphate, soil, photospectrometer materials, and her living costs. She says she’s grateful for the grant and the chance to get useful lab experience. She also knows that any lab experience, even if it doesn’t directly help her reach her future goals, is great for her personal and professional growth. Catie wants to write a paper about her results with the help of Blackman and other postdoctoral researchers working on the project.
Researchers like Catie Kitrinos are still amazed by sunflowers’ ability to clean up soil. Sunflowers’ natural ability to clean up the environment holds a lot of hope for making the future healthier and more sustainable. The fact that these beautiful golden blooms have helped heal the damage caused by nuclear disasters shows how powerful and useful this extraordinary plant can be.
