Cited by 132Plant Stress Responses and TolerancePlant Micronutrient Interactions and EffectsHeavy metals in environment

Advances in “Omics” Approaches for improving toxic metals/metalloids tolerance in plants

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Raza, Ali, Tabassum, Javaria, Zahid, Zainab, Charagh, Sidra, Bashir, Shanza, Barmukh, Rutwik, Khan, Rao Sohail Ahmad, Barbosa, Fernando +4 more·2022·Frontiers in Plant Science

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.

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Crossref · 10.3389/fpls.2021.794373

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  • Non-essential heavy metals such as chromium, cadmium, lead, and manganese induce negative impacts on plant growth, poor crop production, and toxicity to human health.

    “While HMs are essential to plants, substantially, there are non-essential HMs like chromium (Cr), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), manganese (Mn), etc. induce devastating negative impacts on plant growth, culminating in poor crop production and toxicity to human health (Varma, 2021; Lone and Gaffar, 2021; Varma, 2021; Raza et al., 2022; Bhat et al., 2023).”

    From Plant hyperaccumulators: a state-of-the-art review on mechanism of heavy metal transport and sequestration (2025) · cites this paper as Raza et al., 2022

    The Introduction identifies cadmium and lead as non-essential metals that harm plant growth and production, and the Plant Responses section links toxic metals to reduced crop production and potential harm to humans. The Physiological Responses section also reports harmful effects of chromium, but explicitly identifies manganese as essential for photosynthesis, contrary to the claim’s classification of it as non-essential. (LLM, conf=0.90)

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  • Phytotoxic effects of heavy metals include damage to physiological and metabolic networks at cellular and molecular levels.

    “Phytotoxic effects of HMs include damage to various physiological and metabolic networks at the cellular and molecular levels (Raza et al., 2022; Bhardwaj et al., 2023).”

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1 of the 261 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Kakeshpour T. (2020). Tomato Class II Glutaredoxin Mutants Generated Via Multiplex CRISPR/Cas9 Genome Editing Technology are Susceptible to Multiple Abiotic Stresses. Doctoral dissertation. Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University.
  2. Shenton M. Kudo T. Kobayashi M. Nakamura Y. Ohyanagi H. Yano K. (2019). “ Plant omics data center and CATchUP: web databases for effective gene mining utilizing public RNA-Seq-based transcriptome data,” in The Model Legume Medicago Truncatula, ed. de Bruijn F. J. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley), 1137– 1146.

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Authors
Raza, A., Tabassum, J., Zahid, Z., Charagh, S., Bashir, S., Barmukh, R., Khan, R. S. A., Barbosa, F., Zhang, C., Chen, H., Zhuang, W., & Varshney, R. K.
Affiliations
  • Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University (CN)
  • Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CN)
  • National University of Sciences and Technology (PK)
  • International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (IN)
  • University of Agriculture Faisalabad (PK)
  • Universidade de São Paulo (BR)
  • Murdoch University (AU)
Corresponding author
  • Zhuang, Weijian
  • Varshney, Rajeev K.
Venue
Frontiers in Plant Science
Published
2022-01-04
Volume
12
Pages
794373-794373
ISSN
1664-462X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4206241292
Cited by
132
References
261
Citations by year
2026: 32 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 31 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 22
FWCI
2.29
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Frontiers in Plant Science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Open Access Repository of ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) (acceptedVersion)
  • Murdoch University Research Portal (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Murdoch University Research Portal (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1114827)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Plant Stress Responses and Tolerance
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Plant Micronutrient Interactions and Effects
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Pollution › Heavy metals in environment
Keywords
metalloids, heavy metal toxicity, plant stress response, omics approaches, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, ionomics, phenomics, plant defense, stress-inducible genes, food safety, soil and water contamination

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