Elevated levels of explosives and related materials are often found in soil at military installations that involve munitions manufacturing, disposal, testing, and training. As a result, organisms growing in the soils at military ranges are exposed and potentially able to accumulate such organic pollutants. Therefore, assessment of the environmental fate of energetic compounds (munitions) and chemicals with similar structures (munitions-like) must include their bioaccumulation in plants. 'Eve' winter hulless barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) grass was used to study the uptake of munitions and munitions-like compounds [i.a. Nitroguanidine (NQ); 4-Nitroanisole (4-NAN); 2,4-Dinitroanisole (2,4-DNAN)]. The conventional experimental approach towards measuring bioconcentration in plants often involves conducting uptake experiments with natural or synthetic soils. However, soils contain multiple components/phases, and thus using it as exposure medium inadvertently increases experimental variation. To circumvent the problem, a new experimental protocol using fine quartz as an alternative supporting medium has been developed. The new protocol produced stable biomass profiles, constant plant-exposure concentrations and reproducible steady state bioconcentration factors - BCF - (L water/Kg plant dry wt.) within a one-month period. Initial results suggest that BCFs are not directly correlated with octanol-water partition coefficient for the studied compounds. NQ (log KOW = - 0.89 L/Kg) reports a BCF at least three times bigger than that of 2,4-DNAN (log KOW = 1.71 L/Kg), while 4-NAN (log KOW = 2.03 L/Kg) BCF is thrice smaller than such value for 2,4-DNAN. This study has implications to asses and be used as an experimental reference for modeling the bioconcentration potential of hazardous chemicals in the environment.

Bioconcentration of energetic compounds - munitions constituents - in grasses (barley)

246th National Meeting (2013)

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