Omics Technologies for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants: Current Status and Prospects

Abstract

Plants are widely considered as the primary source for sustaining life on earth. As plants are sessile by nature, they are continuously exposed to many environmental stresses at various stages of their life. These abiotic stresses include salinity, drought, flooding, extreme temperatures, heavy metal stress, pollutants, and nutrient deprivation. Abiotic stresses have detrimental effects on growth, vigor and development, and severely limit the productivity of crops worldwide. This is mainly due to the several imbalances that occur at the cellular, molecular, physiological, and developmental levels in plants during such conditions. However, plants are seen to adapt or acclimatize themselves by modulating or making changes at the genome, transcriptome, proteome, miRNAome, lipidome, secretome, and/or metabolomic levels. In the post-genome era, our knowledge and understanding of these adaptations at the various omics levels have taken a tremendous leap due to the advancements in the technologies used to decipher them. All these approaches have contributed remarkably in furthering our understanding of the effects of abiotic stresses and the adaptations which plants undertake to mitigate them. In this chapter, we summarize the advancements in the major omics technologies employed in plant abiotic stress research.