About this Research Topic

Background

Emerging contaminants including heavy metals, micro(nano)plastics, and antibiotic resistance genes have been widely detected in farmland soils and aquatic environments, which exhibited a potential threat to crop plant growth and food safety globally. They exhibit long-distance mobility, high persistence in the environment, bioaccumulation, and toxicity to humans and other organisms. In the context of risk assessment of agricultural soils, it is crucial to acquire knowledge about the behaviors of these compounds in different abiotic and biotic compartments of soils and to define the mechanisms which condition their reactivity, transfers, their capacity to bioaccumulation and, ultimately, their toxic and ecotoxicological effects at different levels of biological integration. Therefore, it is very important to study the toxic effects and uptake, transport, accumulation, and transformation mechanisms of emerging contaminants on crop plants, and to develop soil biological remediation technologies.
Some previous studies were focused on the physiological, biochemical, and molecular toxicity of exogenous pollutants and their remediation technology. However, there is limited information on the toxicity mechanism of emerging pollutants on crop plants as well as novel method establishment for agricultural soil remediation.

This Research Topic aims to collect the latest advances on the impact of emerging contaminants on environmental biological processes, especially the physiological and biochemical processes in crop plants, the analysis of the ecological dynamics of emerging contaminants in soil-plant-microbial systems, and the exploration of bioremediation and phytoremediation techniques to clean the environment polluted by multi-component, organic and inorganic novel pollutants. We particularly encourage research on the rhizome layer of farmland soils with the main focuses as follows: (1) the biogeochemistry of emerging contaminants in the rhizosphere, (2) characterization of rhizosphere microflora and identifying plant root activities, and (3) elucidation of the uptake of these contaminants by root cells and its transport to the aerial parts.

We welcome submissions of high-quality original research papers, reviews, and methods, on the following subtopics (but not limited to):
• Uptake, transport, and transformation of emerging contaminants in soil-crop plants system
• Toxic effects of emerging contaminants on crop plants and biochemical mechanisms of detoxification
• Soil remediation technologies of emerging contaminants including adsorption on biochars, phytoremediation, microorganism degradation, etc.

Keywords: uptake transport and transformation, emerging pollutants, combined pollution, crop plants, soil remediation technology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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