Abstract
Indoor air pollution is of increasing concern for human health. Amongst the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) found indoors, formaldehyde and toluene are two toxic compounds. Indoor plants have an innate capability to remediate indoor airborne pollutants. Zamioculcas zamiifolia is an ornamental plant local to Thailand reported to be very efficient for VOC removal. Indole acetic acid (IAA) was applied to shoots and roots of Z. zamiifolia to enhance the capability for removing a toluene and formaldehyde mixture. We found that 5 μM of exogenous IAA can enhance Z. zamiifolia efficiency about 20% and 40% for toluene and formaldehyde, respectively, after plant was exposed to initial toluene-formaldehyde mixture concentration 20 ppm (1:1) for 3 cycles (156 h). We found that 5 μM of exogenous IAA had a positive effect on the stomatal aperture opening and stomatal conductance. However, 10 μM of exogenous IAA had a negative effect on the opening of stomatal aperture, and thus initially decreased that remediating ability of Z. zamiifolia for formaldehyde and toluene. We investigated the formaldehyde dehydrogenase activity in shoots of Z. zamiifolia and found significantly enhanced FDH activity in plants supplied with exogenous IAA. We concluded that exogenous IAA in optimum amounts could enhance the mitigating ability of indoor plants for airborne air pollutants. However, our research indicated that the application of IAA to roots could have a negative effect on the remediating ability of Z. zamiifolia.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank King Mongkut’s University of Technology (KMUTT) and National Research Council of Thailand for funding this work and financially supporting Mr. Haseeb through the Petchra Pra Jom Klao Ph. D Scholarship (Academic Year 1/2016, contract number 51).
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Haseeb Ullah prepared and conducted in the experiments. Chairat Treesubsuntorn designed the experiments, analysed the data and draft the manuscript. Paitip Thiravetyan conceived the idea, designed the experiments and analysed the data. All the authors discussed and finalized the paper.
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Ullah, H., Treesubsuntorn, C. & Thiravetyan, P. Application of exogenous indole-3-acetic acid on shoots of Zamioculcas zamiifolia for enhancing toluene and formaldehyde removal. Air Qual Atmos Health 13, 575–583 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-020-00820-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-020-00820-y