CHED 175 |
| Contaminants including chemicals from smelter companies and refineries may contribute to soil and water pollution in El Paso, TX. Phytoremediation is a way to use plants to clean up toxic metals from contaminated soils. Hydroponics is a method to grow plants in an aqueous solution which contains all the nutrients plants need in order to grow without using soil. The objective was to observe if sweet tomato and patio tomato can be classified as hyperaccumulators (plant able to uptake metals form soil or water), and to see if the fruit would be toxic for human consumption. The experiment consisted of planting eight sweet tomatoes and eight patio tomatoes through hydroponics. We placed four of each of the two types of tomatoes in Hoagland's solution (a solution containing the proper nutrients that a plant needs in order to grow). The rest of the tomatoes were placed in contaminated Hoagland's solution with the following metals: As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, Sb, and Se. Method 3052 Microwave Assisted Acid Digestion of Plant and Soil Samples and the Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) were utilized to analyze the tomatoes. The metal content found in Patio tomato plants were: 55.39ppm of As, 48.45ppm of Cd,156ppm of Cr, 28.14ppm of Cu, 4.22ppm of Pb, 146.5ppm of Sb, and 54.75ppm of Se. The metal content found in Sweet tomato plants were: 64.58ppm of As, 78.68ppm of Cd, 121.11ppm of Cr, 16.48ppm of Cu, 37.06ppm of Pb, 44.51ppm of Sb, and 43.21ppm of Se. This research was supported in part by MBRS-RISE grant 5 R25 GM 060424, NIH EARDA 2G11HD 035968 Pilot Project, and NSF grant 0421470. |
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Undergraduate Research Poster Session
2:30 PM-4:30 PM, Monday, August 20, 2007 BCEC -- Exhibit Hall - B2, Poster
Division of Chemical Education |