Recent progress on the heavy metals ameliorating potential of engineered nanomaterials in rice paddy: a comprehensive outlook on global food safety with nanotoxicitiy issues

Abstract

Soil contamination with toxic heavy metals (HMs) poses a serious threat to global food safety, soil ecosystem and human health. The rapid industrialization, urbanization and extensive application of agrochemicals on arable land have led to paddy soil pollution worldwide. Rice plants easily accumulate toxic HMs from contaminated agricultural soils, which ultimately accumulated in grains and enters the food chain. Although, physical and chemical remediation techniques have been used for the treatment of HMs-contaminated soils, however, they also have many drawbacks, such as toxicity, capital investment and environmental-associated hazards. Recently, engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have gained substantial attention owing to their promising environmental remediation applications. Numerous studies have revealed the use of ENMs for reclamation of toxic HMs from contaminated environment. This review mainly focuses on HMs toxicity in paddy soils along with potential health risks to humans. It also provides a critical outlook on the recent advances and future perspectives of nanoremediation strategies. Additionally, we will also propose the interacting mechanism of HMs-ENMs to counteract metal-associated phytotoxicities in rice plants to achieve global food security and environmental safety.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Heavy metals
• nanomaterials
• nanoremediation
• rice
• soil pollution

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they do not have any conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Project of Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China (LZ19C140002), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31872017, 32072472), the Key R&D Program of Zhejiang Province, China (2017C02002, 2019C02006, 2020C02006), Shanghai Science and Technology Agriculture Project (2019-02-08-00-08-F01150; 2021-02- 08-00-12-F00771), State Key Laboratory for Managing Biotic and Chemical Threats to the Quality and Safety of Agro-products (2010DS700124-ZZ2014;-KF202101).