“…Although the accumulation of NPs in chloroplasts and damage to the photosynthetic apparatus (Da Costa and Sharma, 2016; Jiang et al, 2017) supports the former, the fact that to reach the chloroplast NPs must cross the plasma membrane, where they can induce reactive oxygen species (ROS) via NADPH oxidases (Sosan et al, 2016) argues the reverse. ROS production, damage to the membrane structure and function, and fluctuation in antioxidant enzymatic activities are documented across plant species as common responses to NPs (Thwala et al, 2013; Vannini et al, 2013; Fu et al, 2014; Mirzajani et al, 2014; Hossain et al, 2015; Xia et al, 2015; Jiang et al, 2017; Tripathi et al, 2017). A few studies have also demonstrated that treatment of plants and photosynthetic microorganisms with NPs resulted in increased production of phenolics (Comotto et al, 2014; Ghorbanpour and Hadian, 2015; Večeřová et al, 2016), which might act as antioxidants to scavenge the ROS (Dixon and Paiva, 1995; Franklin et al, 2009).…”