Cd

Cadmium

Hyperaccumulation threshold: 100 µg g⁻¹ [ref] Primary

Cadmium is non-essential and highly toxic, so hyperaccumulators of it are rare and of intense interest for phytoextraction of contaminated agricultural soils. Southern-French (Ganges) populations of Noccaea caerulescens and the Chinese Sedum plumbizincicola reach exceptional foliar cadmium.

9 species recorded in this database; highest cited value 10,000 µg g⁻¹.

Metal Region Uptake Verify
Arabidopsis halleri Brassicaceae Cd Cadmium 800 8× Central Europe, East Asia Facultative review
Crotalaria novae-hollandiaeNew Holland rattlepod Fabaceae Cd Cadmium 1,250 12.5× Australia (northern subtropical savannahs; Dugald River gossan, Queensland) Facultative primary
Gomphrena claussenii Amaranthaceae Cd Cadmium 280 2.8× Brazil (Minas Gerais) Facultative primary
Noccaea caerulescensalpine pennycress Brassicaceae Cd Cadmium 10,000 100× Western & Central Europe Facultative review
Noccaea praecox Brassicaceae Cd Cadmium 5,800 58× Southeastern Europe Facultative review
Sedum alfredii Crassulaceae Cd Cadmium 900 9× China (southeastern) Facultative review
Sedum plumbizincicola Crassulaceae Cd Cadmium 3,600 36× China (eastern) Obligate review
Solanum nigrumblack nightshade Solanaceae Cd Cadmium 170 1.7× Cosmopolitan (temperate & tropical) Facultative primary
Viola baoshanensis Violaceae Cd Cadmium 2,310 23.1× China (Hunan, Baoshan Pb/Zn mine) Facultative primary

Cadmium news & analysis

Research, industry and conservation context for Cadmium hyperaccumulation and phytoremediation.

Literature

Six chromosome-grade Noccaea caerulescens genomes trace cadmium hyperaccumulation to gene copy number — and finger a magnesium transporter as its possible oldest actor

October 23, 2026 · Kuzmik, Courtin et al. (2026), bioRxiv preprint

Chromosome-grade genomes of six Noccaea caerulescens accessions show that cadmium hyperaccumulation tracks amplification of a handful of transporter genes — HMA3 reaching seven copies in calamine plants — while metal genes overall are not copy-number outliers and an ancestral magnesium-transporter duplication hints the trait began as ultramafic soil adaptation, not metal defence.

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Literature

Primed to remember: treating Silene sendtneri seeds with a growth-promoting bacterium pre-writes its cadmium defenses — and the bacterium may not even need to stay

October 15, 2026 · Subašić et al. (2026), Plants (MDPI)

Biopriming Silene sendtneri seeds with Paraburkholderia phytofirmans PsJN imprints a defense transcriptome before any cadmium is present, letting seedlings survive doses that kill untreated plants and accumulate 8.5× more Cd — while the bacterium itself apparently does not persist, which changes the deployment math for inoculant-assisted phytoextraction.

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Literature

Molybdenum does not wall cadmium out of clove basil — it re-routes the ion traffic, and that is both the opportunity and the problem

October 13, 2026 · Xiao et al. (2026), Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 325:120892

Ion-flux and multi-omics evidence shows Mo fights Cd in clove basil by re-programming where cadmium flows — throttling root uptake, recycling glutathione, and pushing the surviving Cd toward leaf vacuoles — a strategy that makes aromatic-crop phytomanagement safer precisely by extracting *less* metal per plant.

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Literature

Five years, three sites, 31 woody species: the best cadmium and zinc accumulator of the trial never crossed the hyperaccumulation line

October 6, 2026 · Pfendler et al. (2026), Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 324:120820

In the largest multi-site woody phytomanagement trial yet reported, the cultivar that pulled the most Cd and Zn into its leaves and bark still fell short of hyperaccumulation thresholds — evidence that for trees and shrubs on contaminated land, annual metal offtake is a biomass game, and site choice beats species choice.

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Literature

A liverwort parks its metals in the basement: Marchantia polymorpha survives smelter soil by ventral sequestration, but its cadmium uptake saturates far below the hyperaccumulation threshold

September 27, 2026 · Cimerman et al. (2026), Plant and Soil

A soil-gradient experiment in the model liverwort shows Cd uptake saturating around 53 mg kg⁻¹ — barely half the vascular hyperaccumulation threshold — while Zn and Pb track the soil linearly, which makes the species a useful sentinel for two metals and a systematically misleading one for cadmium.

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Literature

Silicon nanoparticles find the cadmium while jasmonic acid absorbs the damage — split duties lift Sedum alfredii removal 67.4% on barely 5–6% more bioavailable Cd

September 26, 2026 · Yang et al. (2026), Journal of Hazardous Materials

A combined silicon-nanoparticle and jasmonic-acid treatment raised total cadmium accumulation in Sedum alfredii by 67.4% while increasing rhizosphere bioavailable Cd by only ~5–6%, because the two amendments play asymmetric roles — one runs metal flux, the other pays the detox bill — an "accumulation-compatible tolerance" recipe that sidesteps the leaching problem that sank chelator-assisted phytoextraction.

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Literature

EDTA and DTPA concentrate metals in castor yet shrink the crop so much that total removal falls — a gold-mine soil trial makes the case for citric acid plus foliar auxin instead

September 22, 2026 · Quronfulah et al. (2026), Journal of the Saudi Society of Agricultural Sciences

On soil from the Mahd Ad'Dahb gold mine, the synthetic chelators EDTA and DTPA raised castor's bioconcentration factors but cut root and shoot growth enough that total metal uptake dropped, while a biodegradable weak acid plus a foliar auxin spray (citric acid + IAA) nearly tripled per-plant cadmium removal — a clean demonstration that assisted phytoextraction can optimize the wrong variable.

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Literature

A hyperaccumulator's roots hunt cadmium in water — and lose the scent in soil

September 13, 2026 · Hu et al. (2026), Bioresource Technology

Split-root experiments in Sedum alfredii show the hyperaccumulating ecotype sends over 60% of its root biomass toward a Cd-enriched patch in hydroponics — but the response disappears in soil, which both explains years of contradictory lab results and relocates the phytoextraction lever from plant breeding to soil management.

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Literature

Timed drainage turns rice into a cadmium pump — managed drying lifted DGT-labile Cd 7.94-fold and cut paddy soil Cd by 37.5% in a single season

September 8, 2026 · Yin et al. (2026), Plant and Soil

A Hunan field trial inverts the standard paddy rule — instead of flooding to keep cadmium out of grain, deliberately timed drying oxidises CdS, acidifies the rhizosphere and lets a high-Cd rice cultivar pull 474.56 g Cd ha⁻¹ out of the soil in one season, at removal efficiency comparable to dedicated hyperaccumulators.

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Literature

AMF–PSB co-inoculation doubles cadmium phytoextraction in Sedum plumbizincicola through complementary growth and mobilisation pathways

August 22, 2026 · Tian, Yang, Yang, Wu, He & Zhan (2026), BMC Plant Biology

A pot study shows that co-inoculating the Cd/Zn hyperaccumulator Sedum plumbizincicola with an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus and a phosphate-solubilising bacterium raises shoot Cd accumulation by 182% by simultaneously increasing biomass and rhizosphere Cd bioavailability.

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Industry

In a Peruvian cacao trial, soil cadmium fell 96% in one season, but the beans barely moved and the plants cannot account for the drop

August 12, 2026 · Alvarado-Alva et al. (2026), Agronomy

Two weedy accumulators planted between cacao trees are credited with a near-total one-season soil-cadmium crash, but a mass balance shows the plants removed on the order of one percent of what vanished, and cacao-bean cadmium, the number that actually gates the crop out of Europe, hardly changed.

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Literature

A calamine bird's-foot trefoil tolerates zinc, lead and cadmium by exclusion — but its shoots still cross the cadmium feed limit

August 8, 2026 · Sujkowska-Rybkowska et al. (2026), Antioxidants

A metallicolous Lotus corniculatus keeps zinc, lead and cadmium out of its shoots by root exclusion and a rerouted redox economy — the exact profile you want for phytostabilisation, and a quiet hazard in a forage legume, because the little cadmium that still gets through exceeds the EU animal-feed limit.

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