Emerging strategies for heavy metal removal in soils: plant-microbe interactions and omics perspectives

Rapid industrial expansion, intensive agricultural practices, and widespread petroleum extraction have led to the significant buildup of heavy metals (HMs) in soils and related ecosystems, posing serious environmental and public health risks. Hence, this review highlights the major sources, ecological impacts, and toxicity of HMs in the environment. However, physical and chemical remediation methods can reduce HMs concentrations, but issues such as high operational costs, prolonged treatment durations, and poor sustainability limit their suitability for large-scale application. Thus, bioremediation methods, especially those that utilize plants and microbes, have gained increasing attention as eco-friendly and cost-effective options. Plant-microbe-based interactions play an important role, as they act synergistically to facilitate metal uptake, stabilization, transformation, and detoxification of HMs in contaminated soils. Though, it is important to understand the plant-microbe interactions, especially since most current research is about how plants and microbes can work together to clean up contaminants in their natural environments. However, achieving higher remediation performance under stress conditions depends on the selection of plant and microbial species. Therefore, this review explores the mechanisms of plant-microbe interactions along with omics technologies employed to analyze samples for understanding this interaction in HMs-contaminated soils at the metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics levels in enhancing the effectiveness of remediation. This review article also highlights key factors affecting remediation efficiency and discusses limitations, challenges, and future prospects of plant-microbe interactions in HMs-contaminated soils.