Global agriculture faces escalating challenges such as land degradation, climate change, water scarcity, and excessive use of agrochemicals, all of which jeopardize food security and compromise sustainable crop productivity. Unsustainable agricultural methods have intensified these problems, resulting in the inefficient utilization of scarce natural resources and diminished resilience of food production systems. In this context, nanobubble technology has emerged as a groundbreaking approach to addressing critical challenges in crop production and ensuring sustainable production through enhancing crop development from the initial germination to later growth stages by promoting nutrient uptake, stimulating growth hormone production, supporting beneficial microbial activity in the rhizosphere, and modifying soil physicochemical properties. These changes primarily result from the molecular and physicochemical modifications induced by nanobubbles. Recent findings further explained that nanobubble-mediated irrigation has also been shown to alleviate both biotic and abiotic stress in crop cultivation. However, the precise mechanisms by which nanobubbles promote plant growth remain incompletely understood. Considering these aspects, this review summarizes i) synthesis methods of nanobubbles ii) recent global research on the application of nanobubbles in agriculture, with a focus on the possible mechanisms by which they enhance crop production, and iii) several key research gaps related to the use of nanobubbles in crop cultivation which highlighting the critical need for future studies to address these limitations.
Galahitigama et al. (Thu,) studied this question.