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Considerable attention has been given to the possibility of using hyperaccumulators for phy-
toremediation/phytomining of contaminated or natural metal-rich soils.
Knowledge acquired on
genes involved in hyperaccumulation mechanisms will open the opportunity to use biotechnology to
transfer specific genes to high-biomass promising species. There is also a need to find and charac-
terize more hyperaccumulators, to cultivate them and better assess agronomic practices and man-
agement to enhance plant growth and metal uptake by selective breeding and gene manipulation.
The newer and emerging biotechnological solutions discussed here open plethora of oppor-
tunities to study both effects of specific gene alleles and the outcomes of their modified expression.
This becomes possible through the ability of these approaches to tackle either internal to the gene,
or other (near or distant) sequences in a variety of manners. The possibility to modify single (or low
numbers of) nucleotides, to shuffle their positions in the genome and/or to either block or enhance
their specific activity is something geneticists and breeders were craving for a very long time. It is
only in the last 5 to 10 years that all this has become possible and widely available. The outcomes
of that are poised to be profound and will greatly affect both our understanding and utilization of
mechanisms of heavy metal tolerance to a good for humanity. In this respect it has to be pointed out
that the interest is rising in the potential exploiting of hyperaccumulators as a rich genetic resource
to develop engineered plants with enhanced nutritional value for improving public health
or for con-
tending with widespread mineral deficiencies in human vegetarian diets. The strategies of food crop
biofortification are still in infancy; however their paramount importance for the world‘s population
makes this an exciting line of future research in the field of essential elements hyperaccumulation.
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