Emerging pivotal role of carbon nanomaterials in abiotic stress tolerance in plants: a mini review

Abstract

In recent years, carbon nanomaterials (CNMs) have received a great deal of attention due to the constantly growing demands in the agricultural sector. In this review, we discuss two major abiotic stresses: drought and salt, which have been extensively researched in terms of their impact on plant growth under CNMs treatments. Drought and salt stress are two of the most important environmental factors that affect plants growth and development. There is still a lot we don’t fully understand about how CNMs accumulates, how plants respond to stress, and how they affect plant growth. Researchers all over the world have worked to uncover more about plants and CNMs interact and what happens when plants are exposed to abiotic stresses. The goal of this review is to give the reader an up-to-date look at how the different CNMs help plants grow when they are stressed by drought or salt. Depending on the recommended dose of CNMs used, different species have different growth and production patterns. Lower CNM concentration levels were observed to boost crop productivity and yield, but greater CNM concentration levels under stress conditions were also observed to reduce these traits. In general, CNMs were proved to be efficient at increasing (water uptake, water transport, seed germination, boosting photosynthetic system and antioxidant activities) and reducing (MDA, H₂O₂ content) while concentration levels were limited; they were found to be less effective at both of these changes when concentrations were high. Taken together, the current state of studies on how CNMs affect the development of plants is encapsulated, and the most important knowledge gaps are also addressed.

Keywords:

• Antioxidant
• chlorophyll
• H₂O₂ content
• MDA
• photosynthesis

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Department of Biology, College of Science, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University and Department of Physics, Faculty of Applied Science, Umm Al-Qura University for their valuable support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.