A greenhouse pot experiment to study arsenic accumulation in rice varieties selected from gangetic bengal, india

Abstract

It is predicted that around 100 million people living in the Ganga-Meghna- Brahmaputra plain are at the risk of serious arsenic toxicity through exposure of contaminated groundwater (Chakraborti D et al., Groundwater arsenic contamination in Ganga-Meghna-Brahmaputra plain, its health effects and an approach for mitigation. In: UNESCO UCI groundwater conference proceedings. 2008). Groundwater arsenic contamination in the Gangetic Bengal has been termed as the largest mass poisoning in the history of human kind (Smith et al., Bull WHO 78(9):1093-1103, 2000). Arsenic pollution has spread in fourteen out of total nineteen districts of Gangetic Bengal (Chakraborti et al., Mol Nutr Food Res 53(5):542-551, 2009). Application of arsenic-contaminated groundwater for irrigation in Gangetic Bengal has shown to influence accumulation of arsenic in rice, the major staple food in West Bengal (Meharg, Trends Plant Sci 9:415-417, 2004, 2009; Signes-Pastor et al., J Agric Food Chem 56(20):9469-9474, 2008; Bhattacharya et al., Paddy Water Environ 8(1):63-70, 2010a; Samal et al., J Environ Sci Health Part A: Environ Sci Eng 46:1259-1265, 2011; Banerjee et al., Sci Rep 3, Article number: 2195, 2013; Santra et al., Procedia Environ Sci 18:2-13, 2013). Rice is an efficient accumulator of arsenic than any other cereal crops (Su et al. Plant Soil 328:27-34, 2010) and consumption of rice has been termed as an important source of inorganic arsenic intake to human body (Meharg et al., Environ Sci Technol 43(5):1612-1617, 2009).