Metal translocation in the plant increased when microbial consortium resistant to copper was added to the sediment. In fact,copper concentration in plant stems increased up to two times relatively to plants exposed to sediment without inoculation. In addition, comparatively to control (plants exposed to sediment without addition of copper) there was also a significant increase in copper concentrations in plant leaves. So, the microbial consortium increased P. australis potential to phytoextract copper from contaminated sediments. A similar behaviour was observed for this plant when the same strategy was applied to recover Cd contaminated
sediments (Nunes da Silva et al., 2014), indicating that this
strategy seems to work for both metals despite their differences.