Abstract
Food safety has emerged as a high-urgency matter for sustainable agricultural production. Toxic metal contamination of soil and water significantly affects agricultural productivity, which is further aggravated by extreme anthropogenic activities and modern agricultural practices, leaving food safety and human health at risk. In addition to reducing crop production, increased metals/metalloids toxicity also disturbs plants’ demand and supply equilibrium. Counterbalancing toxic metals/metalloids toxicity demands a better understanding of the complex mechanisms at physiological, biochemical, molecular, cellular, and plant level that may result in increased crop productivity. Consequently, plants have established different internal defense mechanisms to cope with the adverse effects of toxic metals/metalloids. Nevertheless, these internal defense mechanisms are not adequate to overwhelm the metals/metalloids toxicity. Plants produce several secondary messengers to trigger cell signaling, activating the numerous transcriptional responses correlated with plant defense. Therefore, the recent advances in omics approaches such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, ionomics, miRNAomics, and phenomics have enabled the characterization of molecular regulators associated with toxic metal tolerance, which can be deployed for developing toxic metal tolerant plants. This review highlights various response strategies adopted by plants to tolerate toxic metals/metalloids toxicity, including physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses. A seven-(omics)-based design is summarized with scientific clues to reveal the stress-responsive genes, proteins, metabolites, miRNAs, trace elements, stress-inducible phenotypes, and metabolic pathways that could potentially help plants to cope up with metals/metalloids toxicity in the face of fluctuating environmental conditions. Finally, some bottlenecks and future directions have also been highlighted, which could enable sustainable agricultural production.
Highlights
Over the last few decades, intensive anthropogenic activities and modern farming practices have led to the contamination of ecosystems by toxic metals/metalloids (Rai et al, 2019), an alarming global concern
We describe recent innovations in “omics” approaches such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, ionomics, miRNAomics, and phenomics that could empower the development of toxic metals/metalloids tolerant plants
Increasing metals/metalloids toxicity poses a severe threat to agricultural production by hampering plant growth and yield
Summary
Over the last few decades, intensive anthropogenic activities and modern farming practices have led to the contamination of ecosystems by toxic metals/metalloids (Rai et al, 2019), an alarming global concern. Molecular regulators (genes, RNA, metabolites, and proteins) and their related activities like replication, translation, posttranslation, transcription, etc., play a pivotal role in the performance and maintenance of critical plant functions Since they determine plant responses to toxic metals/metalloids stress, the understanding of regulatory principles at the genetic level is necessary. Plants have different mechanisms to prevent metal ions from reaching the nucleus, the entry of metals/metalloids causes cross-linking of DNA and proteins, DNA mutation (deletion, addition, modification), alter the base structure of the DNA, or cause DNA strands to break (Emamverdian et al, 2015) They further disrupt lipids, damage Chl, disturb cell homeostasis, and interfere with the electron transport chain and energy production and assimilation through ATP molecules, leading to programmed cell death (Parmar et al, 2013). Rice crop has been studied for Fe toxicity using a GWAS approach, and three linkage disequilibrium (LD) blocks
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