emerging-contaminants
Emerging contaminants are pollutants—including pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and agricultural chemicals—that are increasingly detected in aquatic and terrestrial environments but remain largely unregulated. For plant scientists, these compounds are of growing concern because wetland and riparian vegetation is often directly exposed to contaminated water and sediments, potentially affecting plant physiology, growth, and ecological function. Understanding how plants absorb, accumulate, or metabolize these substances is also critical for evaluating the role of vegetation in natural and engineered phytoremediation systems.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 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.
