“…In addition, silicon is beneficial for plant fitness, and was shown to alleviate metal toxicity (Adrees et al, 2015). Recent studies have shown the presence of metals and metalloids in phytoliths in plants growing in contaminated environments (Buján, 2013;Lisztes-Szabó et al, 2019;Delplace et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2021;Nguyen et al, 2019;Tran et al, 2019). It was suggested that phytoliths are involved in a detoxification mechanism (Buján, 2013;Delplace et al, 2020;Rizwan et al, 2016), and that phytoliths could play an important role in metal (Nguyen et al, 2021;Tran et al, 2019) and carbon (Song et al, 2016) biogeochemical cycle in soils.…”