Analysis of hyper-accumulating plants

Recently, Professor I. Nakai (Tokyo University of Science, Japan) and his colleagues published a very interesting report on synchrotron X-ray fluorescence analysis of the cadmium hyper-accumulating plant, Arabidopsis halleri ssp. gemmifera. To investigate the Cd accumulation mechanism, they analyzed the spatial distribution and chemical form of Cd at a cellular level. At Japanese synchrotron facility, SPring-8, a tiny beam of 3.8 × 1.3 μm² with 37 keV X-rays was used to see Cd K X-rays. For more information, see the paper, "Micro X-ray fluorescence imaging and micro X-ray absorption spectroscopy of cadmium hyper-accumulating plant, Arabidopsis halleri ssp. gemmifera, using high-energy synchrotron radiation", N. Fukuda et al., J. Anal. At. Spectrom., 23, 1068-1075 (2008).