Harnessing Gasotransmitters for Enhanced Plant Resilience: Strategies for Managing Metalloid(s) Stress

Metalloids pose significant concerns for risk assessors and toxicologists due to their well-documented hazards to plant systems and yield penalties. Certain metalloids such as boron, selenium, and silicon are essential or beneficial for healthy plant growth; others like arsenic, tellurium, antimony, and germanium are highly toxic to plants, depending on their concentrations and the ability of the crop to grow and survive. Plants emit various chemicals to combat damage caused by diseases, insect feeding, or abiotic stress. Plants employ innovative strategies to enhance resilience, maintain essential balance, and counteract abiotic stress. Notably, gasotransmitters (GTs)-small, gaseous signaling molecules such as nitric oxide, hydrogen sulfide, ethylene, methane, and carbon monoxide-have recently emerged as crucial players in plant stress responses. To mitigate metalloid toxicity in plants, GTs have the potential to modulate reactive oxygen species scavenging machinery, maintain cellular redox homeostasis, activate stress-responsive genes, and facilitate advantageous interactions with plant growth regulators and other signaling molecules. Gaining insights into the complex stress conditions that induce GT production and exploring the interactions among different GTs can illuminate how plants manage multiple abiotic stresses. Given their significant potential in agriculture, GTs are poised to become widely adopted in the near future. Upcoming research is likely to focus on elucidating the molecular basis of GT-mediated signaling, understanding their roles in plant-microbe interactions, and exploring their potential applications in agriculture by developing advanced imaging techniques and multi-omics approaches. GTs also promise to improve crop resilience, enhance productivity, and provide new insights into stress adaptation mechanisms. This review provides a comprehensive framework for developing sustainable strategies to enhance plant resilience against metalloid toxicity by integrating current knowledge on GT signaling pathways and their crosstalk with metalloid stress responses.