The increased use of a chemical compound to replace TNT in explosive devices has a damaging and long lasting effect on plants, new research has shown.
In recent years, TNT has started to be replaced with DNAN, but until now very little was known about how this substance impacts the environment and how long it can remain in the soil.
Professor Neil Bruce said:"Similarly to TNT, DNAN reacts with a key plant enzyme, generating reactive superoxide, which is highly damaging to cells. Over the course of our research we have genetically engineered plants to successfully detoxify land contaminated with munitions. In previous studies by the York team, genetically modified grass was grown on land contaminated with military explosives, which successfully degraded contaminants to non-detectable levels in their plant tissues, but as yet there is currently no such method to remove or reduce DNAN.
"We also don't know what the limits of DNAN toxicity are in humans, so our hope is that our latest research will highlight that more work is urgently needed to understand its effects.", was funded by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program of the U.S. Department of Defense and was in collaboration with researchers at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center , U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
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