**4. Conclusion**

Heavy metal pollution is a major issue which invade even in the breast milk of mother. Their toxic effect leads to multi organ failure and several cancers. They readily enter into the agricultural products and food. Health deteriorates due to the toxic effects and rapid accumulation in the environment through irrigation of contaminated water bodies. To prevent or mitigate heavy metal contamination and renovate the contaminated soil, a variety of techniques have been developed including phytoremediation. It has been proved to be a promising technique to remediate heavy metal-polluted soil.

Hyper-accumulation is the most straightforward approach for phytoremediation, and hundreds of hyper-accumulator plants have been identified so far. Phytoremediation has a few limitations including time-consuming process of plants in clearing the contaminants due to their slow growth in altered soil. But the genetic engineering is a powerful tool to modify the plants with resistant traits like fast growth even in polluted soil, high biomass production, heavy metal tolerance by designing their metabolic pathways and good adaption for surviving in various climatic and geological conditions.

Hence, a better understanding of the plant mechanisms for phytoremediation is more essential which comprises of absorption, translocation, and detoxification of pollutant in plants. These are mediated by different biomolecules and metabolic pathways. Their limitations can be overcome by genetic engineering of plants and endophytes to promote more effective way to create sustainable ecosystem. These engineered microbial consortiums can be used to improve soil health and further promote plant growth and fitness. Practically, a single approach will never be effective to the revival of heavy metal-polluted soil. So the combination of different new approaches such as genetic engineering, microbe-assisted bio fertilizer for plant growth promotion as well as detoxification of pollutants, and chelate-assisted approaches to concentrate the pollution near to rhizosphere are vital for highly effective and extensive phytoremediation in future.
