Individual and combined impacts of potentially toxic elements, and tropospheric ozone on crop physiology,...

Tropospheric ozone (O₃) pollution and potentially toxic elements (PTEs) contamination are two of the most inescapable abiotic stressors threatening plant productivity and ecosystem stability. Independently, these stressors induce profound physiological and biochemical disruptions in plants, including oxidative stress, impaired stomatal function, and nutrient imbalances. Ozone primarily affects the apoplast, triggering reactive oxygen species (ROS)-mediated signalling, stomatal closure, and reprogramming of defense-related gene expression. While PTEs infiltrate cellular compartments, compromising photosynthesis, enzyme activities, and redox balance. Emerging studies reveal that their co-occurrence can produce antagonistic, synergistic, or additive possessions, depending on plant species, developmental stage, exposure intensity and experimental system. Both the stressors unite on oxidative stress (ROS) and antioxidant responses, stomatal behaviour, photosynthetic apparatus damage and altered nutrient and metal uptake/partitioning. However, insights into their combined impacts remain scarce. Literature is fragmented by methodological heterogeneity, limited crop coverage, and a lack of comprehensive omics, tracer and transport studies. This review scrutinizes the mechanistic responses of plants to individual and concurrent exposures to O₃ and PTEs, focusing on antioxidant defense systems, signaling networks, and key physiological traits. Additionally, we explore transcriptomic shifts that command acclimation or vulnerability, highlighting the molecular pathways that administrate plant responses under these stress conditions. Understanding these interactions is crucial for breeding resilient crop varieties and optimizing phytoremediation stratagems in polluted agroecosystems. Finally, this synthesis emphasizes the urgent need for multifactorial studies, standardized protocols, and validation under diverse soil and climatic conditions, crop genotypes and O₃ regimes to more accurately predict plant behaviour under real-world environmental stress scenarios.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12298-026-01723-5.