Abstract
Phytoremediation is an emerging technology that employs plants to remove environmental pollutants. The purpose of our research is to produce the transformants that have highper-accumulation ability of heavy metals, which are suitable for phytoremediation. Cd404 gene is isolated from heavy metal-tolerant Chlamydomonas sp. W80, and conferred to Cd-tolerance. In this report we present the transgenic Arabidopsis expressing the Cd404, which is composed of 263 amino acid-residues (29 kDa of molecular mass) with His- and Asp-rich region. The transformants (T2) showed strong resistance to 100–200 μM CdCl2. Furthermore, T3 homozygous lines of the transformants, which were grown for 30 days on the MS medium containing 200 μM CdCl2 showed higher cadmium contents and stronger cadmium tolerance than Col-0 wild type. Possibility of phytoremediation with the transgenic plants will be discussed.
