Depends on what contaminants. Heavy metals would be pretty easy, and I know mustard plants are known for sequestering lead well. That was one of the classes a professor at our school ran, as we had an old lead mill that used to make lead pottery back in the 1800's and 1900's down the street from our school. Flame AA or ICP are both great machines for metal detection. We didn't have an inductively coupled plasma machine or a graphite furnace one but we did have a flame AA. Flame AA being the "cheapest" so to speak using oxygen and acetylene and doesn't have the lower detection limits of the other machines, and also can only test one metal at a time with a metal specific cathode lamp. I did metal contamination
As for halogenated hydrocarbons or organic waste, no idea how plants would fair. But as you said, HPLC/MS would probably be better for those things.
My dad's girlfriend is a hydro-geologist specializing in waste cleanup of nuclear and chemical plants and although she says plant and fungi remediation is really cool, it is not always the most applicable. Plants and mushroom mats might only capture metals in the top ~6 - 10 inches or so, leaving deeper waste, and waste caught in the water table untouched. They have a neat thing where they inject dye into the ground and then check tons of water runoff sites in a huge radius around a site and if they see the dye, that means there's a really good chance contamination has spread that far as well. I think they generally end up moving out tonnes upon tonnes of dirt to be cleaned up and incinerated or they treat massive swaths of land and water tables with catalysts. It's very site and waste type specific though.
Give it a shot with Flame AA, really easy to use and produced nice flames. Grab some dirt and put it in a 5 gallen bucket, then plant some mustard plants. Put some heavy metal contamination in one, none in the other. Then test metal levels in plants vs soil in each bucket.
I found 5 old videos I took of using the flame AA, all of them so terrible and short I won't even upload, but here are 2 screen shots from them.
that's distilled water
and that's non-distilled water. Using different metals produces some really pretty flames.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment