A team of international researchers showed for the first time that insects can play a role in cleaning up contaminated soils. Experts call this surprising finding, which is described in this issue (pp 3581-3586), a turning point for the discipline of phytoremediation. In the initial decade of phytoremediation work, researchers focused solely on studying how plants could transform or accumulate pollutants such as pesticides or metal-containing compounds and deferred questions regarding how the altered or sequestered contaminants might affect the safety of other organisms in the food chain, explains Steve McCutcheon, a pioneer in phytoremediation and senior environmental engineer at the U.S. EPA National Exposure Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga. " [This] groundbreaking work shows that not only are plants reducing the toxicity of contaminants, but that the metabolism of insects and higher trophic level [organisms] may be taking a larger part than we expected."
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