Heavy metal accumulation in soil and water from natural sources or anthropogenic activities
have produced severe environmental contamination in some parts of the world due to the
persistence of metals in the environment by their accumulation throughout the food chain. The
purpose of this book is to present the most recent advances in this field mainly concerning
the uptake and translocation of heavy metals in plants mechanisms of toxicity perception of
metal and regulation of cell response under metal stress. Another key feature of this book is
related to the studies on signaling and remediation processes in recent years which have taken
advantage of recent technological advances including omic approaches. In recent years
transcriptomic proteomic and metabolomic studies have become very important tools for
analyzing both the dynamics of changes in gene expression and the profiles of protein and
metabolites under heavy metal stress. This information is also very useful for plotting the
complex signaling and metabolic network induced by heavy metals in which hormones and reactive
oxygen species (ROS) also play an important role. Understanding the mechanism involved in
sequestration and hyperaccumulation is very important to developing new strategies of
phytoremediation which are reviewed in several chapters of this book. The information included
yields very stimulating insights into the mechanism involved in the regulation of plant
responses to heavy metals which in turn improve our knowledge of cell regulation under metal
stress and the use of plants for phytoremediation.
