Recently, the famous international publisher: ELEVSER awarded to the Professor You-Shao Wang’s team for Most Cited Articles by Chinese Mainland Authors 2005-2010, which has been published in Environmental Sciences Journals. The awarded paper is " Effect of heavy metal stress on antioxidative enzymes and lipid peroxidation in leaves and roots of two mangrove plant seedlings （Kandelia candel and Bruguiera gymnorrhiza）", which has been published in Chemosphere in 2007(Chemosphere. 2007,67(1):44-50).

Mangrove plants grow in tropical and subtropical estuaries in the world. As the development of industry, agriculture, coastal urban and maritime port bulkhead, a great deal of environmental pollutants contaminant in the areas of estuaries and also give the impact for mangrove ecosystems. Mangrove ecosystems as primary producers of estuaries are supporting a broad range of land and marine ecosystems. Mangrove ecosystems can be providing the food for the organism, which lives at the sea and the continental margin, and also the habitat sites for breeding about birds, insects, fish and shellfish, algae. Mangrove ecosystems can also make a complex food chain and food web. Therefore, the problem of pollution ecology of mangrove plants has become a new and important research area in the world. The research for mangrove ecosystems relates to heavy metal pollution, oil pollution and mangrove plants for the accumulation and absorption of organochlorine pesticides.

At present, the awarded paper has been cited 43 times by the international SCI journals, which are covering 32 international journals in the fields of the marine, environment, biology and other fields, such as, Chemosphere, Science of the Total Environment, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Ecotoxicology and European Journal of Soil Biology ect.. The paper researched about the heavy metal stress on mangrove plants Kandelia candel and Bruguiera gymnorrhiza The effects of multiple heavy metal stress on the activity of antioxidative enzymes and lipid peroxidation were studied in leaves and roots of two mangrove plants, Kandelia candel and Bruguiera gymnorrhiza, grown under control (10‰ NaCl nutrient solution) or five levels of multiple heavy metal stress (100‰ NaCl nutrient solution containing different concentration of Pb²⁺, Cd²⁺, and Hg²⁺). Leaves and roots of control and heavy metal-stressed plants were harvested after two months. In leaves of heavy metal-stressed plants superoxide dismutase (SOD) and peroxidase (POD) activities fluctuated in different stress levels compared to the control, while catalase (CAT) activity increased with stress levels in K. candel, but remained unchanged in leaves of B. gymnorrhiza. In comparison with the control, the dynamic tendency of SOD, CAT, and POD activities in roots of heavy metal-stressed plants all ascended, and then declined. The increase in enzyme activities demonstrated that K. candel is more tolerant to heavy metals than B. gymnorrhiza. Lipid peroxidation was enhanced only in leaves of heavy metal-stressed B. gymnorrhiza. These results indicate that in heavy-metal stress antioxidative activities may play an important role in K. candel and B. gymnorrhiza and that cell membrane in leaves and roots of K. candel have greater stability than those of B. gymnorrhiza. For pollution monitoring purposes, POD activity in roots and leaves maybe serve as a biomarker of heavy metal stress in K. candel, while lipid peroxidation maybe serve as biomarker in B. gymnorrhiza.

（contact: Dr. wang Yaoshao）