Antimony soil-plant transfer

Abstract

Plants growing in antimony-contaminated soils provide a potentially important exposure route for humans and animals to antimony via food contamination and grazing feed [1-3]. Antimony can accumulate in plant tissues [4, 5] and may be toxic to plants [6, 7]. Although background antimony concentrations in soil are typically <10 mg kg^-1 [8, 9], much higher concentrations in soils contaminated by sources such as mining and smelting can result in extremely high concentrations detected in plants growing in these soils [10-12]. For example, up to 11,800 mg kg^-1 antimony has been reported in soils contaminated by waste rock surrounding one of the world's largest antimony mines, the Xikuangshan (XKS) mine in China [13], and numerous studies report on uptake and high concentrations in the plants (up to 4,029 mg kg^-1), including crops, growing in the contaminated soils [12, 14, 15]. Nevertheless, plant concentrations and toxicity depend on a range of environmental factors that control antimony speciation, solution concentrations, soil to root transfer, plant uptake, and translocation.