Persistent Organic Pollutants- A Silent Threat to the Agro-ecosystem and Surrounding Environment

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are a class of hazardous, bio-accumulative, biomagnified, and extremely persistent chemicals with plausible extended off-site mobility in the environment or agro-ecosystem. These constitute a wide variety of chemicals, their sources may be either natural or anthropogenic. These are contaminants of emerging concerns for researchers as well as environmentalists. These contaminants are supposed to cause toxicity in terms of their carcinogenic, genotoxic, neurotoxic, and endocrine disruptors nature. Therefore, it is very important to discuss various kinds of POPs present in the environment and their detection methods. Various extraction and analytical techniques have been strategized to determine the POPs in soil and food samples either quantitatively or qualitatively. The literature lacks a comprehensive review over various POPs present in the environment, different techniques of their extraction and analysis, along with their toxicity in agro-ecosystem. The present review is expected to fulfills this gap by considering all the necessary aspects discussed above.