Abstract
Heavy metal accumulation in soil has been rapidly increased due to various natural processes and anthropogenic (industrial) activities. As heavy metals are non-biodegradable, they persist in the environment, have potential to enter the food chain through crop plants, and eventually may accumulate in the human body through biomagnification. Owing to their toxic nature, heavy metal contamination has posed a serious threat to human health and the ecosystem. Therefore, remediation of land contamination is of paramount importance. Phytoremediation is an eco-friendly approach that could be a successful mitigation measure to revegetate heavy metal-polluted soil in a cost-effective way. To improve the efficiency of phytoremediation, a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying heavy metal accumulation and tolerance in plant is indispensable. In this review, we describe the mechanisms of how heavy metals are taken up, translocated, and detoxified in plants. We focus on the strategies applied to improve the efficiency of phytostabilization and phytoextraction, including the application of genetic engineering, microbe-assisted and chelate-assisted approaches.
Highlights
With the development of industrialization and urbanization, the abundance of heavy metals in the environment has increased enormously during the past decades, which raised significant concerns throughout the world (Suman et al, 2018; Ashraf et al, 2019)
Heavy metal pollution is a vital issue for agricultural production and food health due to the toxic effects and rapid accumulation in the environment
Phytoremediation has been proven to be a promising technique for revegetation of heavy metal-polluted soil with a good public acceptance and shows a variety of advantages compared with other physicochemical techniques
Summary
With the development of industrialization and urbanization, the abundance of heavy metals in the environment has increased enormously during the past decades, which raised significant concerns throughout the world (Suman et al, 2018; Ashraf et al, 2019). Heavy metals are a group of metallic chemical elements that have relatively high densities, atomic weights, and atomic numbers. The common heavy metals/metalloids include cadmium (Cd), mercury (Hg), lead (Pb), arsenic (As), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), nickel (Ni), and chromium (Cr). These heavy metals/metalloids originate from either natural or anthropogenic sources such as produced water generated in oil and gas industries (Neff et al, 2011; Pichtel, 2016), use of phosphate fertilizers in agriculture (Hamzah et al, 2016; Rafique and Tariq, 2016), sewage sludge (Farahat and Linderholm, 2015), metal mining and smelting (Chen et al, 2016), pesticide application (Iqbal et al, 2016), electroplating, and fossil fuel burning (Muradoglu et al, 2015)
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