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Soil contamination with heavy toxic metals is a major environmental problem caused by global industrialization. Conventional soil remediation methods are expensive and not environmentally friendly. The new technology, phytoremediation, is the use of green plants to clean the environment of pollutants and is presented as an affordable and non-destructive alternative to traditional methods. For this reason, phytoremediation is a promising way to improve the soil, which can easily absorb heavy metals and toxic substances and remove them from the soil. In this chapter, phytoremediation, its various methods, its advantages over other methods, and finally its future perspectives are discussed.

The rapid growth of the population and the reduction of resources make it necessary to study the ways of optimal use of food production potential for greater productivity in arid and semi-arid environments. Water stress is one of the most important global threats to food production. Also, climate change and population growth in the world are broadening the scope of this problem. On the other hand, in the arid and semi-arid regions, due to the shortage of rainfall and insufficient precipitation as well as the high rate of evapotranspiration, there is always shortage of surface water. Also, since the water resources in these areas are usually saline and of low quality, finding pure water in these areas is a major problem. In such areas, most of the arable lands are affected by salinity stress, either by saline waters or by soil salinity. One of the most effective ways to reduce water stress and salinity damage to plants/crops is to breed the plants to tolerate these stressors. Hence, the breeders are working with various breeding methods to find plant varieties that could tolerate water stress and salinity. Genetic modification of crops to increase their tolerance to water stress and salinity is a very important issue in plant breeding, and the detection and evaluation of drought, flooding, and salinity-tolerant germplasms are very difficult and a time-consuming process. In this chapter, different breeding methods (conventional and molecular) for finding plants/crops tolerant to water stress and salinity are discussed.

Twentieth-century human beings, with all their tremendous advances, are still struggling to provide food due to the growing population. The quality of rice grains plays an important role in consumer satisfaction. After the grain yield, improving the grain appearance, cooking quality, aroma, and taste of rice are other important goals of rice breeding. In this chapter, the traits related to grain quality in rice are discussed physiologically and molecularly, and the works performed in this regard are reviewed.