Multifactorial Role of Phytogenic CeO₂ NPs in Crop Improvement and Stress Alleviation: A Mechanistic Overview

Numerous biotic and abiotic stresses can affect plants. These stresses negatively affect crop's development, growth, and yield, leading to issues with food security and financial loss. With the development of new technologies like nanotechnology, the negative impacts of environmental stressors on plants have been lessened. After being tested on a variety of agricultural plants, nanotechnology has recently gained a lot of attention since it can improve the health of the soil and crops while minimizing the need for chemical fertilizers. It improves the composition and properties of soil and morphology, physiology, biochemical attributes, and yield of plants. CeO₂ NPs help plants to grow, manage diseases, promote growth, reduce plant stress, and enhance nutrient management. When CeO₂ NPs are applied to plants under biotic and abiotic stressors, they trigger stress signaling cascades that scavenge the reactive oxygen species (ROS) (highly reactive oxygen containing species produced as a byproduct of cellular metabolism and can also be produced by environmental stresses) produced and boost plant growth and production. CeO₂ NPs showed beneficial effects in raising agricultural output by enhancing a variety of physiological and biochemical indicators, which increased yield. This study will provide the latest outlook on the optimum use of CeO₂ NPs in sustainable agriculture. Moreover, the review article also highlights the impacts of CeO₂ NPs on biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, plant performance, and the fundamental processes that mitigate environmental stresses. In this review, we discussed the mechanism of uptake, accumulation, stress alleviation, harmful and beneficial effects of CeO₂ NPs on plants and the environment. A brief overview of the future research that will be focused on more advanced tasks in CeO₂ NPs, more sustainably.