Contaminants of emerging concerns (CECs) like pharmaceutical and personal care products are routinely being detected in waste-water stream and water treatment plants. Phytoremediation is employed for treatment of water to make it safe for human or agricultural use. Understanding the biotransformation of CECs by plants is crucial in designing an effective phytoremediation strategy. Model system like hairy root cultures of horseradish induced by <i>Agrobacterium rhizogenes</i> are widely used to study the metabolism of contaminants in plants. However, the model system is known to require specialized skills to grow and maintain and takes around two months just to induce hairy roots. We, herein, report a new maize root culture based model to study the biotransformation of CECs. Surface sterilized maize seeds were germinated in solid medium containing Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium for one week. Shoots were cut-off from the seedlings and remaining parts were transferred to sterilized liquid MS medium where they propagated vigorously during another week. Finally, the roots were transferred to separate liquid MS containing 100 mM acetaminophen (pharmaceutical) and 100 µM azoxystrobin (fungicide). Samples were taken after 0,3,6,24,48,72 and 96 hours and extracted with 80% methanol containing 0.1% formic acid by ultrasonication for 15 minutes. The uptake of the compounds and metabolite identification were done with a hybrid quadrupole-linear ion trap mass spectrometer connected to an HPLC. The biotransformation results from this study were found to be identical to those reported in the literature. But, considering the amount of time to grow and perform the experiment, we propose the maize root culture as a new model system to study the biotransformation of CECs in plants.

Maize root culture based model system for studying biotransformation of contaminants of emerging concerns

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.