Mineral nutrition of plants greatly depends on both environmental conditions, particularly of soils, and the genetic background of the plant itself. Being sessile, plants adopted a range of strategies for sensing and responding to nutrient availability to optimize development and growth, as well as to protect their metabolisms from heavy metal toxicity. Such mechanisms, together with the soil environment, meaning the soil microorganisms and their interaction with plant roots, have been extensively studied with the goal of exploiting them to reclaim polluted lands; this approach, defined phytoremediation, will be the subject of this review. The main aspects and innovations in this field are considered, in particular with respect to the selection of efficient plant genotypes, the application of improved cultural strategies, and the symbiotic interaction with soil microorganisms, to manage heavy metal polluted soils.

Heavy metals are often present naturally in soils, but many human activities (e.g. mining, agriculture, sewage processing, the metal industry and auto

Plants need many different metal elements for growth, development and reproduction, which must be mobilized from the soil matrix and absorbed by the r