Toxicity of pesticides to plants and non-target organism: a comprehensive review

Pesticides are agrochemicals used to increase agronomic production and higher economic profit. However, these chemicals could be persistent in soil and water, collective in silt or bio-aggregates in biota relying upon their dissolvability, prompting various kinds of natural contamination. These pesticides have also shown detrimental effects such as phytotoxicity, genotoxicity, and cytotoxicity on target plants along with alteration in their antioxidant system. The demerits continue as they also affect non-target species such as humans, birds, animal, and other aquatic organisms. The higher accumulations of pesticides are also responsible for the generation of ROS that leads to oxidative stress and finally cell demise. Thus, in this review the toxicity of pesticides will be discussed in detail at a cellular and molecular level linked with the response of the plant defense system. Besides, various strategies that have been commonly used worldwide to remediate the toxicity have also been highlighted in the later section. The study will help plant researchers and chemical engineers to understand the gap between the research and a novel, innovative, and cost-effective technique/ procedure will be outlined for healthy environments.