antibiotic-contamination
Antibiotic contamination refers to the presence of antibiotic compounds in soil and aquatic environments as a result of agricultural runoff, pharmaceutical waste, and livestock operations. These compounds can be taken up by plants through their roots, potentially accumulating in plant tissues and disrupting normal growth, photosynthesis, and microbial symbiosis. Understanding how plants respond to and accumulate antibiotics is critical for assessing food safety risks and developing phytoremediation strategies to clean contaminated environments.
PubMed · 2026-04-07
Cattails (Typha latifolia) can remove roughly 90% of the veterinary antibiotic enrofloxacin from water, and researchers have now mapped out exactly how the plant absorbs, stores, and breaks it down — including converting it into a second antibiotic, ciprofloxacin.
Cattails removed approximately 90% of enrofloxacin from water, following predictable first-order removal kinetics across environmentally relevant concentrations of 10 and 100 μg/L.
Plants biotransformed enrofloxacin into ciprofloxacin — a related antibiotic — marking the first time this conversion pathway and its kinetic model have been characterized in Typha latifolia.
Despite 35 days of antibiotic exposure, cattails showed no significant toxicity; they actually displayed a mild growth-stimulating (hormetic) effect on roots and increased photosynthetic pigment levels.
