Systems biology approaches to improve drought stress tolerance in plants: State of the art and future challenges

Abstract

Drought stress induces a vast array of responses in plants that require the use of integrative and multidisciplinary approaches to understand the different levels of regulation. Holistic systems biology approaches still remain unexploited, which is especially important for plant and agricultural sciences. Given the increasing development of high-throughput genomic tools and concomitant progress on plant genome sequencing, it is now possible to gain quantitative information at a comprehensive scale and a quantitative overview on the gene-to-metabolite networks that are associated with a particular plant phenotype. Systems biology aims to find regulatory mechanisms controlling gene expression, to identify candidate genes and molecular markers to support promissory strategies to engineer and/or breed plants with desired traits such as enhanced quality. Most of the systems biology approaches rely upon three main axes representing the multiple layers of the regulation of gene expression: transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Coupled with the study of the noncoding genome, new insights into the regulation of gene expression are being provided as well as their effects on the phenotypic changes in a specific biological context. Bioinformatics tools have been crucial in omics-based research to manage genome-wide datasets, extract valuable information, and facilitate knowledge exchange between model and crop species. The present chapter reviews the use of system biology approaches undertaken to understand drought stress response in plants, providing a critical discussion on the constraints and future prospects of using these approaches to address the current needs of agriculture in a context of climate change.