Exploring the link between heavy metals detoxification and crop improvements.

Heavy metal (HM)/metalloids stresses have a detrimental effect on agriculture and the ecosystem because they impose severe strains on plants, which are sessile by nature, and cause extreme economic losses. It is imperative to safeguard crop plants from HMs to maintain sustainable agriculture and meet the global need for food from an ever-increasing population. Anthropogenic activities provide a threat to agricultural soils by contaminating them with toxic HMs, which can lead to an excessive build-up of arsenic (As), aluminium (Al), cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), nickel (Ni), lead (Pb), and mercury (Hg) in food crops. This offers serious health concerns to humans since they got merged into the food chain. Finding ways to stop these harmful metals from building up in food requires knowing how plants absorb, move, and break down these toxins. Therefore, in the present study, universal distribution, toxicity of HMs and their emergence in the food chain, uptake and transport, detoxification mechanisms in plants, and ways of crop improvement under HM stress conditions have been explored. Conventional remediation methods can be costly, labor intensive, and environmentally disruptive. HMs/metalloids generate oxidative stress, disrupts cellular homeostasis, inhibits photosynthesis, and interfered with nutritional uptake leading to significant yield losses in plants. To cope up these stresses, plants utilize complex molecular mechanisms for resilience such as antioxidant enzymes activation, metal’ transporters upregulation, formation of metal chelation complexes, and variation of stress related genes and transcription factors. In contrast bioremediation offers a sustainable and ecofriendly alternative by leveraging the detoxification capabilities of plants, microbes, and their symbiotic interactions. Practices like phytoremediation, microbial-assisted remediation, and combined approaches involving nanobiochar, biostimulants, and organic amendments have established promising outcomes in restoring HMs/metalloids contaminated soil. In this study we have attempted to outline the different HMs/metalloids toxicity, uptake, and detoxification in one place. This would reduce the obstacles to agricultural output and the world’s food demands while also assisting in understanding the better HMs’ resilience in crop plants.