Mechanistic and future prospects in rhizospheric engineering for agricultural contaminants removal, soil health restoration, and management of climate change stress.

Climate change, food insecurity, and agricultural pollution are all serious challenges in the twenty-first century, impacting plant growth, soil quality, and food security. Innovative techniques are required to mitigate these negative outcomes. Toxic heavy metals (THMs), organic pollutants (OPs), and emerging contaminants (ECs), as well as other biotic and abiotic stressors, can all affect nutrient availability, plant metabolic pathways, agricultural productivity, and soil-fertility. Comprehending the interactions between root exudates, microorganisms, and modified biochar can aid in the fight against environmental problems such as the accumulation of pollutants and the stressful effects of climate change. Microbes can inhibit THMs uptake, degrade organic pollutants, releases biomolecules that regulate crop development under drought, salinity, pathogenic attack and other stresses. However, these microbial abilities are primarily demonstrated in research facilities rather than in contaminated or stressed habitats. Despite not being a perfect solution, biochar can remove THMs, OPs, and ECs from contaminated areas and reduce the impact of climate change on plants. We hypothesized that combining microorganisms with biochar to address the problems of contaminated soil and climate change stress would be effective in the field. Despite the fact that root exudates have the potential to attract selected microorganisms and biochar, there has been little attention paid to these areas, considering that this work addresses a critical knowledge gap of rhizospheric engineering mediated root exudates to foster microbial and biochar adaptation. Reducing the detrimental impacts of THMs, OPs, ECs, as well as abiotic and biotic stress, requires identifying the best root-associated microbes and biochar adaptation mechanisms.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Sudhir K Upadhyay reports was provided by Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University. Sudhir K. Upadhyay reports a relationship with Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University that includes: employment. Sudhir K Upadhyay has patent NA pending to NA. All authors (Himanshu K. Pathak, Prabhat K. Chauhan, Chandra Shekhar Seth, Gopal Dubey, Sudhir K. Upadhyay) have no conflict of interest that appeared in this work. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)