The actual knowledge about food and the environment underlines the fact that agricultural and environmental sciences must solve various problems regarding copper uptake from soil to plants and its bioaccumulation, being important issues for copper concentration in crops and also for phytoremediation of polluted soils. We studied the relation between the form in which copper is applied to soil and the consequential copper bioavailability, uptake and translocation, using as examples simple and complex copper compounds. The copper concentration in basil plants harvested from soils treated with copper compounds and the calculated values of transfer coefficient, translocation factor, bioaccumulation factor, and uptake coefficient demonstrated that the ionic copper (from simple salts) is not necessarily easier to uptake than complex ions, but is easier translocated in plants, while the copper given as complex ions is most likely to be retained by roots. The results indicated that the involvement of copper complexes in agricultural treatments is a solution for soils phytoremediation, concerning the phytostabilization technology.
