Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Bizily SP
PROVIDER: S-EPMC21997 | biostudies-literature | 1999 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Bizily S P SP Rugh C L CL Summers A O AO Meagher R B RB
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 19990601 12
Methylmercury is an environmental toxicant that biomagnifies and causes severe neurological degeneration in animals. It is produced by bacteria in soils and sediments that have been contaminated with mercury. To explore the potential of plants to extract and detoxify this chemical, we engineered a model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, to express a modified bacterial gene, merBpe, encoding organomercurial lyase (MerB) under control of a plant promoter. MerB catalyzes the protonolysis of the carbon-- ...[more]