Heavy Metal Tolerance in Plants and Algae—2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Heavy metals represent an important constraint for living organisms in water and on land. Although some of them are useful as trace elements for plant and algae metabolism, they are very toxic when absorbed in large quantities. Heavy metal soil and water contamination due to natural and, above all, anthropogenic activity has a strong impact on both crop production and natural ecosystems, ultimately affecting living organisms’ health, food availability, and the lives of whole ecosystems. Being sessile organisms, plants cannot escape unwanted changes in their environment and have evolved a series of mechanisms that allow them to cope with heavy metal toxicity and acquire tolerance toward it. Plants can adopt different strategies, including lower accumulation, sequestration in inert compartments, chelation, and the mitigation of negative effects through a reduction in oxidative stress or chemical conversion of the stressor agents. Understanding how plants can tolerate heavy metals is crucial, especially in this period of important challenges driven by the strong requirement of environmental sustainability. Research in this area is driven by the hope of reducing heavy metal uptake not only in crops, but also in wild plants, thereby decreasing the risk of contamination in animals and human beings. Understanding these mechanisms will open the way to the production of hypo accumulator crops and hyperaccumulator plants to address phytodepuration. Currently, many studies are being carried out to address the onset of metal tolerance focused on tools taking into consideration transcriptomics (transcriptome), proteomics (proteome), ionomics (trace elements), and metabolomics (metabolome). In this Special Issue, articles (original research papers or reviews) that focus on heavy metal sensing, uptake, and detoxification, involving biochemistry, physiology, genes, proteins, and metabolites, and how these tolerance mechanisms evolved in different classes of plant organisms, are welcome.

Prof. Anna Torelli
Dr. Matteo Marieschi
Guest Editors

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• heavy metal tolerance
• heavy metal sensing
• heavy metal uptake
• heavy metal sequestration
• phytochelatin
• glutathione and oxidative stress
• cysteine synthesis and degradation
• heavy metal tolerance evolution
• hyper and hypo accumulator plants
• environmental pollutants
• stress mitigation

• Heavy Metal Tolerance in Plants and Algae in Plants (6 articles)