Impact and current perspectives of NPs on soil nutrients

Currently, the agriculture sector alone is using myriad of nanoparticles (NPs) for increasing crop production or developing stress tolerance in order to meet continously increasing food demands. So, it is inevitable for these engineered NPs to reach agricultural soil, which makes it essential for us to investigate their route as well as impact on the soil ecosystem. In soil, the fate and transport of NPs have established comparatively lesser attention even though the quality of what we consume as food is almost exclusively dependent on soil health. Some research studies available on this suggest a possible pathway of NP entry, aggregation, and stabilization into the soil ecosystem. Soil health can be defined through four main aspects: nutrient cycles, soil structure, soil ecosystem and carbon transformation. It is evident that soil is acting as the largest sink of NPs and their introduction into the soil ecosystem could influence microbial diversity, which has a direct role in the nutrient cycle as well as crop production. Both biological (biodiversity, biomass, microbial communities, enzymes, etc) and chemical properties (mineral nutrients, C, N content, organic matter, etc) of soil can be influenced by the everyday added nanomaterials and therefore research studies in this area are becoming more relevant now.