Towards understanding abiotic stress signaling in plants: Convergence of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic approaches

Abstract

All aspects of a plant’s life-beginning with the seed germination and ending with the seed formation-are adversely affected by different abiotic stresses such as salinity, flood, drought, heat, cold, etc. Being sessile, plants have developed excellent mechanisms of stress perception and signal transduction. Multiple, complex, and dynamically intertwined interactions among nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites determine the phenotype and final response of plants towards environmental stresses. In response to these stresses, a multitude of processes are activated which enable the plants to cope with these stresses up to a certain extent. These include alteration of expression of stress-responsive genes, production of stress proteins, alteration of ion transport, activation of various antioxidant systems, and compatible solute accumulation. Our knowledge of abiotic stress signaling has grown in leaps and bounds since the emergence and developments in the omics technologies. Genome-scale studies at transcript, protein, and metabolite levels provide information about dynamic changes taking place at these functional levels. For full understanding of signaling networks, it is essentially important to integrate all these aspects. This approach is of remarkable applicability when the aim is to understand how plants react to abiotic stresses. In order to understand molecular basis of stress tolerance along with signaling network under unfavorable environmental situations, recent progress on systematic use of omics technologies including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics has been summarized in this chapter. Furthermore, the integration of all these approaches, which provide systems biology method for understanding stress response in plants, is also discussed.