Pumpkins, squash, zucchini and their relatives accumulate soil pollutants in their edible parts.
Pumpkins, squash, zucchini and their relatives accumulate soil pollutants in their edible parts. A Kobe University team has now identified the cause, making it possible to both make the produce safer and create plants that clean contaminated soil.
The gourd family of plants comprising pumpkins, zucchini, melons, cucumbers and more are known to accumulate high levels of pollutants in their edible parts. Kobe University agricultural scientist INUI Hideyuki says: “The pollutants don’t easily break down and thus pose a health risk to people who eat the fruit. Interestingly, other plants don’t do this and so I became interested in why this happens in this group specifically.”
In previous studies, the Kobe University researcher and his team identified a class of proteins from across the gourd family that bind to the pollutants, thus enabling them to be transported through the plant. Earlier this year they published that the shape of the proteins and their binding affinity to the pollutants influence the accumulation in the aboveground plant parts. “However, these proteins exist in many other plants, and even among the gourds, there are varieties that are more prone to accumulating pollutants than others. We then noticed that in the highly accumulating varieties, there are higher concentrations of the protein in the sap,” says Inui. Thus, his team turned their attention to the secretion of the pollutant-transporting protein into the plant sap.
Read More: Kobe University
Photo Credit: Pixabay
