Microbe-mediated nanotechnology for heavy metal detoxification and crop resilience: mechanisms, advances, and future prospects

Nanoparticles as catalysts of change: toward third-generation seed technology and stress-resilient crops

Engineering Redox-Active Nanozymes as Emerging Tools for Sustainable Agriculture.

Over the past century, agrochemicals have boosted crop productivity and food supply, but concerns over environmental pollution and agricultural sustainability have increased interest in alternative technologies. Redox-active nanozymes are promising tools for regulating ROS-dependent stress responses and pollutant transformation, yet their agricultural use remains limited by insufficient mechanistic understanding. This review examines their major catalytic pathways involved in ROS generation, scavenging, and signaling in agroecosystems. Representative applications are discussed in crop protection, including abiotic-stress mitigation, pathogen control, and insecticide synergism through ROS homeostasis, antioxidant defense, hormone responses, photosynthetic maintenance, ion balance, and metabolic adjustment; and in agroenvironmental management, including detection and removal of pesticides, mycotoxins, antibiotics, heavy metals, and phenolic pollutants. Green synthesis and post-treatment strategies are also summarized. Finally, we discuss challenges in nanozyme design for agricultural scenarios, field stability and efficacy, economic feasibility, intrinsic toxicity, long-term environmental fate, and ecological risk.

Harnessing magnesium nanoparticles for enhanced crop growth and stress mitigation

Sustainable Production of Solanaceous Vegetable Crops Under Climate Change: The Role of Nanoparticles in Enhancing Abiotic Stress Adaptation

Climate change represents a major global challenge that threatens agricultural productivity, ecosystem stability, and food security by intensifying abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, and extreme temperatures. Solanaceous crops, which are economically and nutritionally important worldwide, are highly sensitive to these stresses, leading to oxidative damage, impaired photosynthesis, and reduced yield and quality. Nanotechnology has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate these adverse effects. Due to their unique physicochemical properties, nanoparticles (NPs) enhance nutrient uptake, improve water-use efficiency, and regulate plant metabolic processes. They also activate antioxidant defense systems, reduce reactive oxygen species (ROS), and improve the delivery efficiency of growth regulators and bioactive compounds. This review synthesizes recent literature on abiotic stress responses in solanaceous crops and evaluates the role of nanoparticles as mitigation strategies, focusing on physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms. The scope includes drought, salinity, and temperature stresses, as well as nano-enabled applications such as nano-carriers and nano-sensors. Overall, nanoparticle applications improve plant tolerance by enhancing antioxidant activity, regulating stress-responsive pathways, and improving resource-use efficiency, thereby contributing to increased crop productivity under climate change conditions. However, challenges related to nanoparticle toxicity and environmental risks remain, emphasizing the need for optimized and safe application strategies. These findings highlight the potential of nanotechnology as a sustainable tool to enhance the resilience and productivity of solanaceous crops under changing climatic conditions. This review highlights that nanoparticles can enhance abiotic stress tolerance in solanaceous crops by improving antioxidant activity, photosynthesis, nutrient uptake, and water-use efficiency under adverse environmental conditions. Overall, nanotechnology represents a promising strategy for sustainable crop production under climate change, although further studies are needed to ensure its environmental safety and long-term applicability. This review provides a comprehensive overview of abiotic stress effects on solanaceous crops and highlights the role of nanoparticles as a sustainable tool to enhance plant tolerance, productivity, and resilience under climate change conditions.

Graphene-based nanomaterials for plant stress resilience and nutrition: a systematic review

Abstract Global food security faces escalating threats from biotic and abiotic stresses, driving the urgent need for innovative strategies to enhance plant resilience in agricultural systems. Graphene-based nanomaterials (GNMs) have emerged as a promising toolkit for sustainable agriculture due to their unique physicochemical properties. This systematic review comprehensively synthesizes and evaluates the current evidence from 23 studies on the role of GNMs in mitigating environmental stresses in plants. The findings demonstrate that GNMs, particularly functionalized derivatives like graphene oxide and graphene quantum dots, can significantly enhance plant tolerance to abiotic stresses such as salinity, drought, and heavy metal toxicity. The mechanisms primarily involve augmenting the antioxidant defense system, protecting photosynthetic machinery, and modulating water and ion homeostasis. A limited but promising body of evidence also indicates that GNMs can induce systemic resistance against fungal pathogens. However, the effects are critically dependent on a triad of factors including nanomaterial type, application concentration, and the specific plant-stress context, with higher doses often inducing phytotoxicity. A major translational gap is identified, as the current research is predominantly confined to controlled environments. Therefore, while GNMs hold significant potential for climate-resilient agriculture, their safe and effective application necessitates meticulous dose optimization and a decisive shift toward long-term field validation studies and multi-location trials to account for geographic variability in environmental conditions, which is essential for regulatory approval.

Polyphenol-Inspired Materials for Agricultural Applications.

Securing global food production while reducing environmental burdens demands materials that combine high nutrient use efficiency with sustainability. Polyphenols, a class of natural plant-derived molecules, provide redox activity, multidentate interactions, and strong interfacial adhesion, making them versatile building blocks for bio-derived agricultural systems. This review summarizes recent advances in the molecular design and multifunctional applications of polyphenol-inspired materials across diverse agriculture sectors, including soil remediation, seed coating, nutrient delivery, crop protection, sensing, nitrification inhibition, and food preservation. It focuses on interfacial assembly, structure-property relationships, and environmental interactions of polyphenol-enabled materials, which collectively govern their performance from laboratory tests to field conditions. Key challenges in current agricultural practice-including low precision and high labor dependence, environmental degradation and ecological imbalance, instability under extreme environmental conditions, and low economic efficiency and unsustainability-are also discussed. Finally, future directions centered on precision and smart agriculture, ecosystem protection, climate-resilient plant interfaces, and circular bioeconomy are outlined. This review presents a comprehensive framework that connects molecular innovation to system-level applications, offering a roadmap for future research and the deployment of polyphenols in agriculture.