Drought stress tolerance in plants: Insights from metabolomics

Abstract

Global climate change and population growth are two major challenges of the twenty-first century. Crop losses due to variable weather patterns associated with climate change have risen over the past decades, and climate models predict an increased incidence particularly of droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures. This situation together with the growing food demand is anticipated to pose a real threat to global food security. It is therefore imperative to develop strategies to improve food availability substantially in variable environments, and ultimately, transfer this knowledge to farmers in the timeframe needed. Although much progress has been done over the past years in the area of drought tolerance in plants, the mechanisms defining plant resilience to water scarcity are still not completely understood. One approach to improving our knowledge of plant tolerance to drought stress is to reveal the underlying central metabolic pathways that might play an important role in sustaining cellular homeostasis to ensure plant survival in water scarcity conditions. Metabolomics is therefore finding an increasing number of applications to investigate plant metabolite responses to abiotic stress, particularly coupled to mass spectrometry (MS)-dedicated analytical technologies. In this chapter, recent applications of MS-based metabolomics to study plant responses to drought stress are discussed, from sample preparation to the analysis of metabolic responses. Understanding the global drought stress response through changes occurring at the metabolite level (i.e., metabolic reconfiguration and adaptation) is fundamental to improving drought stress tolerance in plants.