FUNGI found in people鈥檚 back gardens could help clean up the depleted uranium dust left on battlefields in Iraq and the Balkans. At present, the only way to decontaminate sites is to collect and dispose of munitions fragments by hand, which fails to deal with uranium dust.
Depleted uranium has twice the density of lead and is added to bullets and shells to give them extra momentum to penetrate and destroy targets. These weapons spread the uranium across the battlefield, where it can persist in the environment for decades. Residual uranium-235 in the material can damage kidneys, and has been linked to nerve damage and lung cancer.
Now a team led by Geoffrey Gadd at the University of Dundee, UK, says that several common types of fungi can grow on the uranium and chemically assimilate it.
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The team grew these fungi in the lab using a medium containing fragments of depleted uranium. They found that parts of the fungi in contact with the metal became coated with a yellow substance (Current Biology, vol 18, p R375).
This, it turned out, comprised several forms of uranyl phosphate, a substance which Gadd says is 鈥渃apable of long-term uranium retention鈥� in that it does not break down naturally. This will 鈥渉elp prevent uptake by plants, animals and microbes鈥�, he says.
What鈥檚 more, uranyl phosphate is insoluble in water, which Gadd says might prevent the spent uranium from leaching out into the soil.
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