Department of Plant Sciences

GEOCHEM–EZ is a multi-purpose chemical speciation program, designed to replace Geochem-PC, which can only be used in DOS consoles. This program is used in plant nutrition to perform equilibrium speciation computations to estimate the activity of ions in solution and to consider simple complexes and solid phases. It is also important in molecular biological research to modify solution composition for phenotyping and screening transformed organisms (e.g., transgenic Arabidopsis plants), controlling pH, redox conditions, ionic strength (e.g., for protoplast isolations) or for using heterologous systems, such as yeast expressing plant genes.

To enhance the usability and to address several weaknesses of Geochem-PC, we upgraded the program using a Java graphical user interface, improving both the power and function, and allowing it to run on any computer that supports Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

This program includes improvements, such as interactive and illustrated help files, hierarchical organization of options, logical output, and real-time error checking, while maintaining complete backward compatibility to the Geochem-PC format. We added a customizable database of common salts, eliminating the need to parse and calculate the concentration of each metal or ligand. This last feature will make data input more rapid and help eliminate the most common user errors. One can instantly preview input and output files and make necessary corrections (e.g. charge balance the solution), something that formerly involved having to save these files and run the calculations a second time. GEOCHEM-EZ is available as a free download from http://www.plantmineralnutrition.net/Geochem/geochem%20home.htm