Biostimulants signaling under Cd, Al, As, Zn, and Fe toxicity

Toxic effects from heavy metal contamination of water and soil have significantly hampered crop quality and output. As a result of expanding population and rising food consumption, the problem has gotten worse. Several research works have discovered that countering heavy metal toxicity in plant at all physiological, metabolically, and molecular levels might lead to enhanced agricultural productivity. Recent breakthroughs in biological sciences fields including metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, among many others have aided in the detection of heavy metals endurance metabolites, transcription factors, and stress-inducible proteins, which can subsequently be used to produce heavy metal-tolerant crops. Apart from that, biostimulants can play an important role to overcome the toxicity by several means. A biostimulant for the plant is a chemical or microbe that is administered to the plants to improve the metabolic along with physiological activities such as nutritional balance, abiotic stress together with the quality. This chapter examines the adverse effects of different heavy metals at the crop levels and the role of biostimulant to cure this toxicity and how they impart the important role to increase the growth along with the development of plants to maximize crop yield by including different factors such as roles of microelements, metabolites, distinct stress-inducible proteins, and phytohormones, among others.