Investigating the effect of elevated CO2 in the growth environment of salt-stressed plants using integrated omic analyses

Abstract

In an era at which the need for high and consistent quality of crops and the cultivation processes is a major objective of agro-biotechnology and the food industry, furthering our understanding of how the plants respond to various stresses at the molecular level gains significant interest. High soil or water salinity is a major abiotic stress and a substantial constraint for crop production worldwide, thus the investigation of its effect on plant physiology has intensified in the recent years. In light of the greenhouse effect, how the plants respond to elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) in their growth environment has been the subject of many studies so far. Omic analyses allow for an extensive perspective of the molecular physiology to be obtained at various molecular levels of cellular function. Mainly transcriptomic and metabolomic studies have been carried out individually or in combination to acquire insight to the molecular mechanisms underlying the response of the plants to high-salinity or elevated CO2 perturbations. While physiological studies have shown that the elevated CO2 can alleviate the effect of salinity stress, there has presently been only one omic analysis of the combined perturbation. In this chapter, we present the transcriptomic or metabolomic studies, emphasizing on the integrated analyses of both the levels of cellular function, of salinity and elevated CO2 stresses in plants, individually or in combination. The specifications of the experimental design of both the plant growth and the omic analyses, the challenges of such experiments, the acquired results, and future directions are also discussed.