Plants and Metal
This duck was created by Liz Rylott, Paulina Dani, Anthony Jones, Ben Bruce and Jess Dobson.
Long Boi was a metallic-looking duck. He had a silvery tummy, hints of copper and gold in his wings, and his greeny-blue, iridescent head is the colour of many metal salts like nickel. We wanted to exaggerate these features to explain our research.
We created Long Boi Bling using gold leaf, coloured foil, and a giant ball bearing for the ‘nanoparticles’. Mark Bentley drilled some shallow holes in the wooden base plate and we used an adhesive to glue the ball bearings in.
There was a lot of gluing, varnishing, and everything got quite messy. Metallic shreds of foil got everywhere; the keyboard I am typing on is covered in them…
Metals such as gold, platinum and nickel are critical components in developing technologies such as electric vehicles and mobile phones; however, these finite reserves are running out.
In our research, we look at the biology behind how plants take up metals from waste sources, then use this knowledge to develop plants that recover, and concentrate, these valuable elements from diluted wastes in our environment. Plants deposit gold and palladium as tiny nanoparticles in their tissues; represented by the metallic ball-bearing shown on Long Boi Bling.
Some plants take up nickel at such high levels that their sap is the colour of nickel salts, a greeny-blue like Long Boi Bling’s head. Liz Rylott and her team in the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products work with chemists to find ways to use the metals as catalysts to convert the plant material into products such as biofuels. The metal can then be recovered too.
Many areas around the world are polluted with toxic levels of metals such as mercury, lead, and the metalloid arsenic. In the longer-term, we hope to develop plants that can remediate these sites, restoring the ecology, increasing biodiversity and improving soil and human health.
Study with us
Final year research projects in this area might explore topics from health and disease to sustainable food and fuel, working with researchers at the forefront of industrial biotechnology.