The increased use of a chemical compound to exchange TNT in explosive devices has a harmful and long lasting effect on plants, latest research has shown.
Lately, TNT has began to get replaced with DNAN, but until now little or no was known about how this substance impacts the environment and the way long it may possibly remain within the soil.
Researchers on the University of York have been studying the environmental impact of the explosive, TNT, for greater than a decade. They’ve shown that the chemical compound, which is utilized by the military around the globe, stays within the roots of plants where it inhibits growth and development.
Now a brand new study, led by Professor Neil Bruce on the University of York’s Department of Biology and Director of the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP), nevertheless, has shown that DNAN has similar effects to TNT, but accumulates throughout the plant and lingers for longer.
Professor Neil Bruce said: “Similarly to TNT, DNAN reacts with a key plant enzyme, generating reactive superoxide, which is very damaging to cells. Over the course of our research we’ve got genetically engineered plants to successfully detoxify land contaminated with munitions.
“Unfortunately DNAN is a really different story to TNT, because it accumulates within the above ground parts of the plant. While plants can use natural processes to scale back the toxicity of TNT, our studies found that plants appear to haven’t any natural way of fighting off the toxic effects of DNAN, meaning that it persists within the plant and is toxic at much lower concentrations.”
Researchers warn that as DNAN is present throughout the plant and not only the basis system, as is the case with TNT, there’s a greater risk of animals eating the infected plant, introducing the toxin into the food chain.
In previous studies by the York team, genetically modified grass was grown on land contaminated with military explosives, which successfully degraded contaminants to non-detectable levels of their plant tissues, but as yet there’s currently no such method to remove or reduce DNAN.
The US is estimated to have over 10 million hectares of military land contaminated with constituents of explosives and the US government estimates that remediation of unexploded ordinances on US military training ranges alone will cost $16-165 billion.
Dr Liz Rylott, co-author of the study from the University of York’s Department of Biology, said: “Recent years have seen an escalation in military explosives as a consequence of global conflicts, and so we’re potentially taking a look at vast scales of pollution, which implies there’s an urgent need, and interest in, developing sustainable plant-based remediation strategies.
“We also do not know what the bounds of DNAN toxicity are in humans, so our hope is that our latest research will highlight that more work is urgently needed to grasp its effects.”
This research, published within the journal Nature Plants, was funded by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) of the U.S. Department of Defense and was in collaboration with researchers on the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
