The heavy metal cadmium (Cd), as one of the major environmentally toxic pollutants, has serious impacts on the growth, development, and physiological functions of plants and animals, leading to deterioration of environmental quality and threats to human health. Research on how plants absorb and transport Cd, as well as its enrichment and detoxification mechanisms, is of great significance to the development of phytoremediation technologies for ecological and environmental management. This article summarises the research progress on the enrichment of heavy metal cadmium in plants in recent years, including the uptake, transport, and accumulation of Cd in plants. The role of plant roots, compartmentalisation, chelation, antioxidation, stress, and osmotic adjustment in the process of plant Cd enrichment are discussed. Finally, problems are proposed to provide a more comprehensive theoretical basis for the further application of phytoremediation technology in the field of heavy metal pollution.

Recently, plant bioreactors have flourished into an exciting area of synthetic biology because of their product safety, inexpensive production cost, and easy scale-up. Duckweed is the smallest and fastest-growing aquatic plant, and has advantages including simple processing and the ability to grow high biomass in smaller areas. Therefore, duckweed could be used as a new potential bioreactor for biological products such as vaccines, antibodies, pharmaceutical proteins, and industrial enzymes. Duckweed has made a breakthrough in biosynthesis as a chassis plant and is being utilized for the production of plenty of biological products or bio-derivatives with multiple uses and high values. This review summarizes the latest progress on genetic background, genetic transformation system, and bioreactor development of duckweed, and provides insights for further exploration and application of duckweed.

Since antimicrobials were banned as feed additives, coccidiostats with favorable anticoccidial action and growth promotion have been widely used in the breeding industry. The monitoring of coccidiostats in feed is necessary, while the current methods based on mass-spectrometer analysis have limited applicability and matrix effects could interfere with the results. Accordingly, in the present paper, a rapid analytical strategy for the simultaneous determination of six synthetic coccidiostats in feed using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode-array detection was developed. Coccidiostats in chicken feeds were extracted with the trichloroacetic acid–acetonitrile solution. The cleanup was performed by dispersive solid-phase extraction after the optimization of the response surface methodology. The method exhibited good linearity for target coccidiostats within the range of 0.05~20 µg/mL. Recoveries for six compounds in fortified feed samples were from 67.2% to 107.2% with relative standard deviations less than 9.6%. The limit of detection was 0.2~0.3 mg/kg. The successful application of the method in commercial feed verified that it is effective and sensitive for the rapid determination of multiple coccidiostats in chicken feeds.