The Emerging Role of Omics-Based Approaches in Plant Virology

Abstract

Virus infections in plants are a major threat to crop production and sustainable agriculture, which results in significant yield losses globally. The past decade has seen the development and deployment of sophisticated high-throughput omics technologies including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, in order to try to understand the mechanisms underlying plant–virus interactions and implement strategies to ameliorate crop losses. In this review, we discuss the current state-of-the-art applications of such key omics techniques, their challenges, future, and combinatorial use (e.g., single cell and spatial omics coupled with super-resolution high-throughput imaging methods and artificial intelligence-based predictive models) to obtain new mechanistic insights into plant–virus interactions, which could be exploited for more effective plant disease management and monitoring.