No.9679   January 25. 2007

Suntory Succeeds in Engineering Water-purifying Plant Life
—Ultradense Phosphorus Plants to Purify Rivers and Lakes—

The Institute for Advanced Core Technology, Suntory Ltd. (Osaka Prefecture) has partnered with Florigene PTY Ltd. in a joint biotechnology venture to successfully engineer “water-purifying plant life” capable of storing higher concentrations of phosphorus than plant life in its natural state. (Florigene is located in Victoria, Australia; this venture is financed entirely by the Suntory Group.) Suntory and Florigene will now move to the next stage, testing practical applications for this cutting-edge purification method to deal with increasingly polluted water in rivers and lakes.

Plants naturally absorb and store phosphorus, a primary plant nutrient. Isolating and extracting the gene in the Arabidopsis plant that regulates the phosphorus absorption and storage processes, Suntory and Florigene engineers injected Torenia flournieri with this genetic material to increase its capacity for absorbing and storing phosphorus in high concentrations (patent pending) and successfully create a new strain of water-purifying plant. This process results in a Torenia flourieri plant capable of accumulating three to six times the concentration of phosphorus than plants not injected with this gene.

Suntory’s original floating propagation technology (high-tech sponges used to grow plants on the water surface; patent pending) is key to implementing this new type of water purification on a practical level. Using genetically engineered plants grown on special sponges on polluted water not only reduces our environmental footprint, but also enables environmental cleanup at a lower cost than conventional methods of water purification. As an additional benefit, the plants collected from rivers and lakes after being used to filter the water contain high concentrations of phosphorus, making them an ideal source of untreated fertilizer. Suntory’s next objective is to further boost the phosphorus concentrations these plants are capable of storing to create an alternative to phosphorus ore.