Phytoextraction is an in situ decontamination technique using metal accumulating plants and appropriate soil amendments to transport and concentrate metals from the soil into the aboveground parts of plants, which are harvested with conventional agriculture methods. Since most of the metal hyperaccumulating plants only produce very low biomass, and most of plants producing high biomass accumula...

10 11 Reduced bioavailability to soil microorganisms is probably the most limiting factor in the 12 bioremediation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PAH-polluted soils. We used sunflowers 13 planted in pots containing soil to determine the influence of the rhizosphere on the ability of soil 14 microbiota to reduce PAH levels. The concentration of total PAHs decreased by 93% in 90 days 15 when...

Contrary to Lentz et al. (1), I suggested that the sunflower was carried from North America to Europe, not from North America to Mexico. They also misinterpret a number of early documents. In the original Mexican edition of Hernández, Ximénez (2) neither included a drawing of sunflower nor indicated its use by Indians (indios). Hernández called the sunflower chimalacatl and variants, which tran...