Kaalieswari et al. 2021 - arsenic uptake in fenugreek

Kaalieswari, Chakraborty, and Mukhopadhyay tested whether fenugreek, an edible plant used as a spice and vegetable in India, accumulates arsenic after controlled arsenite and arsenate exposure. The paper is useful as plant-uptake and risk-context evidence for fenugreek under contaminated growing conditions, not as a market-basket benchmark for commercial spices.

Key numbers

• The experiment used sodium arsenite and sodium arsenate treatments at 1, 2, and 3 mg/L, with three replicates per treatment and a distilled-water control.
• Table 3 reports arsenite-treatment soil and plant arsenic concentrations of 0.238 +/- 0.002 and 0.155 +/- 0.002 mg/kg at 1 mg/L, 0.236 +/- 0.001 and 0.243 +/- 0.007 mg/kg at 2 mg/L, and 0.259 +/- 0.001 and 0.223 +/- 0.001 mg/kg at 3 mg/L.
• Table 3 reports arsenate-treatment soil and plant arsenic concentrations of 0.536 +/- 0.004 and 0.159 +/- 0.002 mg/kg at 1 mg/L, 0.159 +/- 0.001 and 0.116 +/- 0.003 mg/kg at 2 mg/L, and 0.133 +/- 0.004 and 0.209 +/- 0.002 mg/kg at 3 mg/L.
• Reported bioaccumulation factors ranged from 0.651 to 1.028 for arsenite treatments and from 0.297 to 1.573 for arsenate treatments.
• Table 5 reports hazard indices below 1 for all grouped exposures: arsenite HI was 2.85E-01 for adults and 4.16E-01 for children; arsenate HI was 2.23E-01 for adults and 3.25E-01 for children.
• Table 6 reports ILTCR values above 10^-4 for adults and children across all arsenite and arsenate treatments. Note: the paper’s Table 6 ILTCR columns are numerically identical to the Table 5 HQ columns, which appears to be a printing or calculation error in the source; the ILTCR numbers should not be reused downstream without independently recomputing them from the EDD and cancer slope factor.

Methods (brief)

Fenugreek seeds were procured from grocery stores, germinated in laboratory conditions, and treated daily for 10 days with arsenite or arsenate solutions. Total arsenic in dried plant material was measured after tri-acid digestion using atomic absorption spectroscopy. The paper reports arsenic as total plant arsenic after exposure to specified arsenite or arsenate treatment solutions; it does not speciate the arsenic recovered from plant tissue.

Implications

Certification: This source is not a commercial spice benchmark because the plants were intentionally exposed under laboratory conditions. It can support context notes on arsenic uptake potential in fenugreek grown in contaminated areas.

Courses: The paper is useful for explaining why treatment species and recovered plant analyte should be kept distinct: arsenite and arsenate were used as exposures, but the plant concentration values are total arsenic.

App: Treat as contaminated-growing-condition context for fenugreek and spices rather than typical-market occurrence evidence.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Spices
• Spices
• Herbs And Spices
• Arsenic
• Arsenic, Total

Verification notes

• The PDF title spells the botanical name as “Trigonellna Foenum- Granecum”; this page preserves the printed title in frontmatter.
• The study describes fenugreek seeds as spices and fenugreek leaves as vegetables, but no dedicated fenugreek ingredient page exists; existing broad spice and herbs-and-spices slugs are used.
• The measured plant values are handled as total arsenic. They are not inorganic-arsenic occurrence values for standards pooling.
• Audit 2026-06-09 caught that the source PDF’s Table 6 ILTCR columns are numerically identical to Table 5 HQ columns, which is internally inconsistent and looks like a printing error in the paper itself; the wiki page flags this so future synthesis sessions do not propagate the duplicated values.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.