Fungus Could Be a Fix for Uranium Pollution

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
5 May 2008

Uranium pollution from high-tech armor and munitions is one of the dangerous legacies of the wars in the Balkans and Iraq. But a naturally occurring fungus might help combat the spread of that pollution into local ecosystems. The fungus transforms the uranium into a stable form that shouldn't work its way into the food chain, a new study shows. The findings potentially could help engineers isolate the toxic metal until better ways of cleaning up all but the most heavily contaminated sites can be developed.

Even better, this transformational ability of fungi "would work for pollution with any--depleted or not--metallic uranium and its corrosion products," says environmental microbiologist and lead author Marina Fomina. "Our findings could also be applied to cleaning up contaminated liquid wastes, metal leaching, and recycling and recovery," she says.

Read the full article here:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/505/2?etoc

(The photo was found online without attribution. Should you be the owner of the photo rights, we will remove the photo, should that be your request, or we will be happy to give you the credit to which your copyright entitles you.)