WET Talk 8 Explainer: Better Living Through Phytoremediation

Imagine a world, much like ours, burdened with a toxic legacy. Underground plumes of a ‘rocket science/chip fab’ past haunt the groundwater present. In this world, some smart researchers figure out how to employ trees as “solar-powered pumps” that draw contaminants up through its roots and naturally break the compounds down into  harmless components. They set up an environment that lets “nature do the dirty work.” Surprise! We live in this world right now.

You may have heard of trees being planted for environmental cleanup or have seen the sunflowers surrounding Fukishima and the doubly-cursed Chernobyl. Sunflowers are “hyperaccumulating” plants that are naturally effective against a variety of toxins. Professor Sharon Doty of the University of Washington first isolated high-performing “scrubbing bubbles” microbes and licensed her discovery to Intrinsyx Environmental of Mountian View, who inoculated the roots of trees.

These are no ordinary trees: starting with space between Moffet Field’s baseball diamond (part of the The Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman (MEW) Superfund Study Area where NASA, Fairchild, Rayethon and Intel once roamed) Intrinsyx Environmental planted trees with enhanced endophytes (microorganisms living inside plants) giving them a 95% survival rate growing in soil contaminated by some of the 20th century’s nastiest toxic plumes.

A further application of Intrinsyx’s endophyte technology (Intrinsyx Bio) focuses on the Ag sector, reducing the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which currently consume 2% of global energy consumption. Endophytes custom-developed for a crop deliver fixed nitrogen directly to the plants.

WET Talk 8 features John Freeman and Galen O’Toole from Intrinsyx Environmental discussing the promise and potential of Intrinsyx’s methods of phytoremediation across many use cases.

Useful terms:

• Phytoremediation— the process of using plants to clean up toxic soil or water
• Microbiome— the collective genomes of the microbes (composed of bacteria, bacteriophage, fungi, protozoa and viruses) that live inside and on a host organism
• Endophyte— a bacterium or fungus that lives inside another plant

Intrinsyx Environmental: Endophyte Assisted Phytoremediation

Fast Company: Trees inoculated with probiotics could clean up America’s contaminated land

NY Times: Superfund, Meet Super Plants

NPR: Microbial Magic Could Help Slash Your Dinner’s Carbon Footprint

attn: (video): Injecting this bacteria into plants can replace chemical fertilizers that harm our planet