Silicon as a powerful element for mitigation of cadmium stress in rice: A review for global food safety

Abstract

Every day, agricultural lands are shrinking at an alarming rate and generating heavy metal stress owing to climate change and anthropogenic activities like rapid urbanization, deforestation and industrial development. Being a staple food, high Cadmium (Cd) contaminated rice grain is the prime source of oral Cd intake and poses a serious health risk to consumers. Cd translocation from soil to root cells is achieved by different transporters mainly employed for beneficial mineral uptake in rice. To combat these challenges of food and nutritional security, several feasible approaches have been proposed for Cd mitigation in contaminated landraces. Recently, application of Silicon (Si) is an emerging and fascinating practice to ameliorate Cd inflicted stress conditions. Si plays favourable role to develop elite rice cultivars with consistently low Cd content through vacuolar sequestration, phytochelatins formation, cell wall adsorption etc. In this review, the role of Si against Cd stress with underpinned mechanisms of action has been elaborated.

Keywords

• Rice
• Cadmium stress
• Silicon
• Antioxidant
• Transporter