Heavy Metal Toxicity, Uptake, and Phytoremediation in Crops and Soils
This community investigates how plants absorb, tolerate, and remediate toxic heavy metals like cadmium, lead, and arsenic, with a specific focus on food crops such as rice and wheat.
The research centers on the physiological and biochemical mechanisms of metal stress, including oxidative damage and antioxidant defense responses in plants. A major focus is phytoremediation, using crops and mycorrhizal fungi to accumulate or immobilize contaminants in agricultural soils. Specific applications include reducing cadmium uptake in rice grains, assessing health risks from dietary exposure to contaminated vegetables, and developing strategies to mitigate toxicity in staple crops like wheat and maize. The work frequently examines the interaction between soil chemistry, plant physiology, and microbial activity to manage contamination in paddy and agricultural fields.
The community is most heavily concentrated in cadmium research, representing 9.7% of all tracked cadmium studies and comprising 15,482 papers. It also accounts for 3.9% of arsenic research (5,801 papers) and 3.3% of lead research (6,977 papers).
There are 41,288 papers in this community, primarily published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, and Chemosphere.
Recent work continues to focus on mechanistic insights into cadmium stress alleviation, including the use of boron to inhibit uptake and the role of rhizobacteria in detoxification. Newer studies also examine the design of rice varieties with low cadmium accumulation and the immobilization of arsenic in flooded paddy fields.