Phytomining is the use of hyperaccumulator plants to extract and concentrate valuable or toxic metals from soil into their above-ground biomass, which can then be harvested and processed. This technique is significant to plant science because it reveals how certain plants have evolved specialized molecular and physiological mechanisms to tolerate and accumulate extraordinarily high levels of metals that would be lethal to most species. Understanding these mechanisms informs both the remediation of contaminated soils and the potential sustainable harvesting of rare or economically valuable elements.
Scientists developed a fast, sensitive fluorescence test to measure how much dysprosium—a rare-earth metal used in electric motors and wind turbines—plants absorb into their tissues, paving the way for using plants to mine this critical material from waste sources.
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The fluorescence assay can detect dysprosium at concentrations as low as 0.07 μM, with a detection limit of 0.2 μM even in complex plant tissue samples.
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Sodium tungstate was incorporated into the method to improve accuracy when measuring dysprosium inside plant matrices.
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The high-throughput design of the assay enables efficient screening of many plant species for their rare-earth accumulation potential.
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