Heavy Metal Tolerance in Plants: Role of Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Ionomics

By Samiksha Singh, Parul Parihar, Rachana Singh, Vasudha Singh, S. Prasad. Frontiers in Plant Science, 2016

1,123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Heavy metal contamination of soil and water causing toxicity/stress has become one important constraint to crop productivity and quality. This situation has further worsened by the increasing population growth and inherent food demand. It has been reported in several studies that counterbalancing toxicity due to heavy metal requires complex mechanisms at molecular, biochemical, physiological, cellular, tissue, and whole plant level, which might manifest in terms of improved crop productivity. Recent advances in various disciplines of biological sciences such as metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, etc., have assisted in the characterization of metabolites, transcription factors, and stress-inducible proteins involved in heavy metal tolerance, which in turn can be utilized for generating heavy metal-tolerant crops. This review summarizes various tolerance strategies of plants under heavy metal toxicity covering the role of metabolites (metabolomics), trace elements (ionomics), transcription factors (transcriptomics), various stress-inducible proteins (proteomics) as well as the role of plant hormones. We also provide a glance of some strategies adopted by metal-accumulating plants, also known as “metallophytes.”

Subfields: Analytical Chemistry, Plant Science, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0499954787068b140fd241a905241c7794517d77

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Plant Science

1. P. García‐Caparrós
2. M. Rizwan
3. Shafaqat Ali
4. M. Lao
5. N. Dubey
6. S. Prasad
7. Swati Singh
8. Vasudha Singh

In Pollution

1. S. Prasad
2. D. Spurgeon
3. Shivesh Sharma
4. E. Lahive

Citations in the corpus

• Acquisition and Homeostasis of Iron in Higher Plants and Their Probable Role in Abiotic Stress Tolerance (2018, background): “Heavy metal stress in plants also deteriorates the metabolism of essential elements and severely affects the electron transport chain (Table 2) (Qadir et al., 2004; Dong et al., 2006; Yadav, 2010; Singh et al., 2016).”
• Heavy metal remediation and resistance mechanism of Aeromonas, Bacillus, and Pseudomonas: A review (2020, background): “In hyperaccumulator plants, they are swiftly translocated into leaf vacuoles via xylem (Singh et al., 2016).”
• Sources, effects and present perspectives of heavy metals contamination: Soil, plants and human food chain (2024, background): “Among these, Cr, Cd, Hg, As, and Pb are very toxic and harmful to plant life at practically all levels of pollution [16 – 18].”
• Species Sensitivity to Toxic Substances: Evolution, Ecology and Applications (2020, background): “There is a significant body of evidence for the development of population tolerances to metals in long-term exposed invertebrates, plants and microbial populations (see review of Posthuma and Van Straalen, 1993; Meharg, 2005; Singh et al., 2016; Chandrangsu et al., 2017).”
• Engineering plants for heavy metal stress tolerance (2018, positive): “Real progress for plant-engineering stress tolerance procedures for HM tolerance therefore depend on the gene(s) expression and their product(s), which regulate signalling pathways or are involved in the synthesis of transcription factors that endow engineered heavy metal/ metalloid stress tolerance”
• Oxidative Stress and Antioxidant Metabolism under Adverse Environmental Conditions: a Review (2020, background): “…organic acids, glutathione, phytochelatins and flavonoid and phenolic compounds, however if these mechanisms fail to restrain metal poisoning, a disruption in the equilibrium of cellular redox systems in plants takes place, leading to an increased induction of ROS (Singh et al., 2016b).”