Phytoremediation - Terry Lab UCB

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Dr. Norman Terry is Professor of Plant Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. His lab manager is Dr. Amanda Stiles. Environmental pollution is a major threat to our planet.  The rapidly burgeoning industrialization of China, India and other developing countries is adding enormously to the problems already present in Western countries.  Pollution of precious water supplies is particularly egregious.  Electric utilities, oil refineries, and chemical plants produce billions of gallons of contaminated wastewater each year.  In agriculture, toxic levels of various elements pollute the groundwater as a result of excessive fertilizer application (e.g., nitrates and phosphates) and leaching of naturally occurring trace elements in the soil after irrigation (e.g., selenium). Pollution of both water and soil poses a significant hazard to human health.  In order to deal with this problem, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has instituted strict guidelines that regulate maximum permissible discharge levels of toxic pollutants.  These regulations are embodied in the Clean Water Act, which seeks to restore and maintain the physical, chemical and biological integrity of US waters.  It is one thing for the EPA to mandate that industry and agriculture control their discharges, but it is quite another for businesses to find suitable treatment technologies in order to fulfill the Clean Water Act's legal requirements.  The few technologies that are available for wastewater treatment are usually prohibitively expensive.  As a result many industrial and agricultural operations continue to pollute and, as a consequence, are forced to pay substantial fines or penalties.  Because the need for practical and cost-effective procedures for cleaning up contaminated water and soil is so great, researchers at the Terry lab have dedicated themselves to achieving this goal.  To this end we use a variety of multidisciplinary scientific approaches that integrate cutting-edge laboratory research with studies carried out in the field.  Over the past 18 years, we have had demonstrable success in cleaning up contaminated wastewater and soil (see Research Accomplishments - Case Studies).  If you are an industrial or government agency seeking to remediate or restore a contaminated site, and would be interested in establishing a research collaboration, please contact us at nterry@nature.berkeley.edu. Department of Plant and Microbial Biology 111 Koshland Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3102 Tel: (510) 642-3510; email: nterry@nature.berkeley.edu