Bioinformatics resources for the management of biological information on plant responses towards stresses

Abstract

In natural and agricultural conditions, plants are exposed to multiple stresses that impose severe impact on growth and development. Stress in plants can be considered as a change in growth phage which leads to disturbance of metabolic homeostasis. Plant pathogens result in biotic stresses, whereas environmental stimuli generate multiple abiotic stresses like temperature extremes, drought, chemical toxicity, salinity, heavy metals, oxidative stress and radiation. Plants respond to these stresses and develop better adaptation by activating their intrinsic machinery. Currently, biological research is witnessing increasing development of methods, technologies and implementations for a better mechanistic representation of biological systems. In the era of multi-omics approaches addressing multiple aspects of biological mechanisms shown by plants in response to biotic or abiotic stresses, huge data is emerging out from research work. This data needs proper management, analysis and interpretation in order to decipher plant strategies to combat stresses. In the past decades, a large number of databases, software, tools and web resources were developed to make ease of access for researchers working to decipher plant responses towards stresses. In this chapter we are describing bioinformatics resources which need to describe information on plant responses against stresses. Bioinformatics resources like database of annotated tentative orthologs from crop abiotic stress transcripts, MIPS PlantsDB, GreenPhylDB, Gramene, GCP Comparative Stress Gene Catalog, Plant Stress Gene Database, PASmiR, QlicRice, Rice Stress Gene Catalog, Arabidopsis Stress Responsive Gene Database, STIFDB and STIFDB2 are available to facilitate multi-omics research in this field. Some of these resources are specific to particular plants, whereas others are generalized and contain information about multiple species.