Phytoremediation and Plant Morphophysiology in Contaminated Areas

Dear Colleagues,

Phytoremediation, the use of plants and their associated microbes for environmental clean-up, has gained acceptance as a cost-effective, eco-sustainable, alternative or complementary technol-ogy for engineering-based remediation methods. Phytoremediation is used for cleaning envi-ronments from, e.g., toxic trace elements and/or radionuclides or organic pollutants. However, scientists in many laboratories all over the world still test plants to find more and more efficient species in the prospect of using them in this green technology. The research also includes genetic transformations of plants and/or inoculation of plants with, e.g., resistant microorganisms.  
Plants which are growing on contaminated areas use special strategies which enable them to avoid or tolerate stress. However, if the dose of stress factor is too strong, plants also show the symptoms of malformations which can lead even to plant death. 
At the beginning, both symptoms of defence strategies as well as disturbance symptoms occur at the molecular level. Subsequently, the signs of both plant resistance/adaptation to stress as well as its sensitivity are visible at the cellular, tissue and organ level. These symptoms can be used as markers of particular plant resistance or sensitivity for a given pollutant. 
Therefore, in this Special Issue, which concerns the phytoremediation and morphophysiology of plants growing on contaminated substrate/medium, we welcome the articles (original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, modelling approaches and methods) that focus on symptoms of both adaptation and resistance strategies, as well as distortion effects in plants. The articles can concern:

• The symptoms mentioned above at different levels of organization: (1) cellular level in-cluding molecular, physiological, genetic and structural traits, (2) alterations in plant anatomy and architecture of plant organs (vegetative and generative), and (3) alterations concerning the whole plants; 
• Wild and modified plants, e.g., transgenic plants or plants inoculated by different kinds of microorganisms, in prospect of using them in phytoremediation as well as plants already used in this green technology; 
• Land and water plants growing on contaminated substrate;
• Different types of contaminants, e.g., toxic trace elements and/or radionuclides, organic compounds and the ability of plants to their uptake, accumulation, transport to above ground parts of plants and/or plant ability to organic pollutants decomposition to nontoxic inorganic compounds, e.g., water and carbon dioxide. 

Prof. Dr. Magdalena Krzesłowska
Prof. Dr. Miroslaw Mleczek
Guest Editors

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