Understanding heavy metal accumulation in crops: sources, plant responses, tolerance mechanisms, and environmental effects

Heavy metals are nearly everywhere in the environment, though at low concentrations. They may come to the environment through anthropologinic or natural causes. Their primary means of naturally enriching soils come from the weathering of parent materials. Nevertheless, the usage of agricultural chemicals is equally significant. Rice fields are particularly vulnerable to heavy metal pollution, which harms human health but also lowers soil fertility and agricultural production. Majority of the potentially harmful exposure that humans experience, particularly to cadmium and arsenic, comes from the plant-based foods that we consume. This article focuses on uptake mechanisms of different heavy metals in the plant system with special reference to the responsible genes, their harmful impacts on plants, human beings and overall agricultural soils. Various remedial approaches have been discussed in this article. Numerous techniques have been investigated for the removal of heavy metals from the environment like physicochemical treatment in the soil, use of microbial agents, phytoremediation approaches etc. Traditional heavy metal remediation techniques are limited by processing challenges, costs, and the production of hazardous sludge; thus, research is increasingly directed toward using microbiological agents like bacteria and fungi for the isolation and exclusion of these toxic materials from the environment. Enhancing food safety requires reducing the accumulation of detrimental substances in crops. A molecular knowledge of heavy metals accumulation pathways may allow the design of crop types with much lower harmful substance levels in food.