Chromium interactions in plants: current status and future strategies

Chromium has received relatively little attention from plant scientists compared to other heavy metals in recent times in spite of it being a very a hazardous environmental pollutant. One of the reasons for this is the complexity of the metal’s interactions with biological systems and the difficulty in studying them. Although the possible mode of entry into the plants, resultant toxicity mechanisms and tolerance potential has been worked out in plants there is still a need to get a complete picture of the Cr–plant interactome. With the advent of hyphenated technologies and global gene/protein and metabolite expression/quantification techniques, studies to elucidate the complete metallome are possible albeit resource intensive. This minireview focuses on the recent developments in the field of Cr–plant interactions and proposes a model using a systems biology and integrated -omics approach to decipher the intricacies of Cr–plant interaction.