Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Stress Responses In Arabidopsis thaliana

PAH are toxic organic compounds that originate from fossil fuel burning, power plants, wood-treating facilities, and petroleum-based manufacturing. To develop PAH phytoremediation strategies, the mustard model system Arabidopsis thaliana was studied for its ability to respond to PAH. Spectroscopic analysis on PAH-treated plants yielded a phenanthrene specific "fingerprint". GC/MS revealed that ≈ 3% of the phenanthrene in the media was incorporated into plant tissue. Phenanthrene also inhibited the production of hormones and secondary metabolites, which might explain why phenanthrene-treated plants are stunted in growth. Other mustards internalized phenanthrene similar to Arabidopsis. Strategies to identify Arabidopsis genes that can be engineered into plants for PAH remediation and biomonitoring will also be presented. Thus, plants can efficiently take-up PAH, and could potentially serve as efficient tools for cleaning up PAH-contaminated sites. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 19th Annual International Conference on Soils, Sediments, and Water (10/20-23/2003, Amherst, MA).