Phytoremediation is a nature-based technology that uses plants and their associated microbes to take up, sequester, transform, mineralize, and volatilize environmental contaminants from soil and water. This low-input remediation approach is scalable, addressing problems that cover large areas of land or massive volumes of water. Phytoremediation is considered a low-cost technology with broad applications. 

While phytoremediation approaches have demonstrated success at a commercial level, the journey toward optimizing and understanding the mechanisms involved remains a challenge. Ongoing efforts to enhance the efficacy of remediation and understand the fate of the contaminant in the rhizosphere or within the plant tissue underline the need for continued research in this field.   

This Method Collection aims to describe phytoremediation techniques, such as understanding contaminant uptake by roots, plant-microbe interactions, bioaugmentation, metagenomics, imaging contaminants and endophytic microbes, and tissue metabolite extraction and analysis.  

The methods described will assist researchers in understanding how phytoremediation works in their applied systems and highlight techniques aimed at increasing the performance of these systems.