This review synthesizes current knowledge on HRW-mediated stress alleviation, offering an integrated framework of antioxidant regulation, hormonal crosstalk, and signal transduction, and challenges remain regarding hydrogen perception mechanisms, application standardization, and field-level validation.
Abstract
Abiotic stresses such as salinity, heavy metal toxicity, drought, and extreme temperatures severely limit plant growth and agricultural productivity by disrupting cellular homeostasis and inducing excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation. Hydrogen-rich water (HRW), has emerged as a promising eco-friendly strategy for enhancing plant stress tolerance. This review synthesizes current knowledge on HRW-mediated stress alleviation, offering an integrated framework of antioxidant regulation, hormonal crosstalk, and signal transduction. HRW confers protection through selective scavenging of cytotoxic radicals while preserving signaling ROS, upregulates enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants to maintain redox balance, regulates ion homeostasis and osmolyte accumulation, and protects chloroplast and mitochondrial integrity. Furthermore, HRW modulates gene expression and stress-responsive pathways via interactions with phytohormones and gaseous signaling networks. This integrated approach distinguishes the present work by bridging previously dispersed mechanistic insights across multiple stress types. Despite promising findings, challenges remain regarding hydrogen perception mechanisms, application standardization, and field-level validation. Advancing these areas will support the integration of HRW into sustainable agricultural practices for improved crop resilience.
Heavy metal contamination poses a major constraint to plant growth and agricultural productivity by disrupting cellular metabolism and inducing oxidative stress. Exposure to toxic metals results in excessive accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which damage biomolecules and destabilise cellular homeostasis. Plants mitigate this challenge through a coordinated network of redox-mediated defence mechanisms that includes metal chelation and sequestration, enzymatic antioxidant detoxification, and metabolic adjustment. Beyond these direct responses, ROS also function as key signalling intermediates that activate stress-responsive transcriptional pathways, modulate ion transport, and remodel cell-wall architecture. Crosstalk between redox cues and phytohormones such as abscisic acid, ethylene and jasmonic acid further integrates environmental perception with long-term acclimation. This review synthesises current understanding of the biochemical, structural, and regulatory roles of redox molecules in heavy-metal tolerance, and highlights emerging avenues in omics-driven discovery, genetic enhancement, and microbial strategies. Improved insight into redox-centred defence systems will support the development of resilient crop varieties and sustainable approaches for agriculture in metal-polluted environments.
D. Holman, A. Barker, R. Wu et al.· Journal of Plant Biochemistr...· 0 citations
Crop production is continually exposed to a wide range of abiotic stresses that negatively affect growth and yield, posing a severe threat to global food security. Plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) promote nutrient assimilation, activate antioxidant enzymes, and stimulate phytohormone production to mitigate abiotic stress. However, the effective application of PGPB in the field depends on host colonization, soil specificity, and susceptibility to competitive microbial communities. Recently, non-thermal plasma (NTP) has emerged as a revolutionary tool for sustainable agriculture, making it a priority to develop efficient, low-cost, and eco-friendly strategies to enhance seed vitality and manage abiotic stress. Plasma-generated reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) have been shown to mediate intracellular redox homeostasis and the antioxidant defense signaling network. Furthermore, plasma stimulates MAPK cascades and stress-responsive genes such as LEA1, SnRK2, P5C, and the SOS pathway, ionic balance, and membrane stability, ultimately supporting plant stress adaptation to drought, salinity, and heavy metals. Plasma-induced RONS signaling activates PGPB functional traits such as root colonization, biofilm formation, nutrient mobilization, and plant growth-promoting activities. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying NTP-PGPB microbial multiple stress adaptation and the long-term ecological stability and biosafety of microbial communities remain inadequately resolved. Consequently, future integration of multi-omics approaches, synthetic microbial communities, and field-scale validation is required to explore the mechanistic advances of plasma-modulated microbiome interactions to enable agricultural applications.
Rida Javed, Guang-Yao Ji, Qi Sun et al.· International Journal of Mol...· 0 citations
Heavy metal contamination is a major environmental constraint that negatively affects plant growth, metabolism, and agricultural productivity. Excess metals such as cadmium, lead, and copper disturb cellular functions mainly by inducing oxidative stress, disrupting nutrient balance, and causing toxicity at multiple levels of organization. To cope with these stresses, plants activate complex defense systems, among which melatonin (MT) (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) has recently emerged as a key regulatory molecule. This review highlights MT's central role in coordinating plant responses to heavy metal stress. MT strengthens redox homeostasis by enhancing both enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant systems, thereby reducing reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation and limiting oxidative damage to cellular components. In addition to its antioxidant function, MT regulates metal uptake, transport, and sequestration by modulating transporter families such as NRAMP, ZIP, and HMA, while also promoting detoxification through phytochelatin (PC) and metallothionein (MT) pathways. MT also plays an important role in hormonal crosstalk, interacting with abscisic acid (ABA), jasmonic acid (JA), and salicylic acid (SA) signaling pathways to fine-tune stress perception and downstream defense responses. Furthermore, recent multi-omics studies have shown that MT induces broad transcriptional, proteomic, and metabolomic reprogramming, leading to coordinated adjustments in gene expression, protein activity, and metabolic pathways under heavy metal stress. Overall, MT functions as a central signaling hub that integrates redox regulation, hormonal signaling, and multi-omics networks to enhance plant tolerance to heavy metal stress. These insights deepen understanding of plant stress biology and offer promising strategies to improve crop resilience and phytoremediation efficiency in contaminated environments.
Si-Xi Zhu, Yu-Tian Lv, Shao-Xiong Lin et al.· Plant physiology and biochem...· 0 citations
This review synthesizes current insights into the molecular and physiological roles of phyto‐oxylipins, emphasizing their potential in integrating plant defense mechanisms to enhance crop productivity amid abiotic and biotic challenges.
S. Mansoor, Nabila Bettache, M. Altaf et al.· Physiologia Plantarum : An I...· 0 citations
Recent advances in the biosynthesis, physiological functions, and signaling roles of β-cyclocitral are highlighted, with particular emphasis on its mechanistic crosstalk with ABA, JA, and SA pathways in enhancing abiotic stress tolerance in plants.
P. Alam, M. Faizan, Thamer H. Albalawi et al.· Frontiers in Plant Science· 0 citations
This review comprehensively synthesizes recent advances in abiotic stress perception, signal transduction and hormone‐mediated regulation, highlighting their roles in shaping plant stress tolerance and proposes an integrated multi‐scale framework to provide a holistic understanding of drought and salinity stress tolerance and to guide the development of resilient crop systems.
Muhammad Farooq, A. Khan, A. Hassan et al.· Plant Breeding· 1 citation
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