Increase Crop Resilience to Heat Stress Using Omic Strategies

Abstract

Varieties of various crops with high resilience are urgently needed to feed the increased population in climate change conditions. Human activities and climate change have led to frequent and strong weather fluctuation, which cause various abiotic stresses to crops. The understanding of crops’ responses to abiotic stresses in different aspects including genes, RNAs, proteins, metabolites, and phenotypes can facilitate crop breeding. Using multi-omics methods, mainly genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics, to study crops’ responses to abiotic stresses will generate a better, deeper, and more comprehensive understanding. More importantly, multi-omics can provide multiple layers of information on biological data to understand plant biology, which will open windows for new opportunities to improve crop resilience and tolerance. However, the opportunities and challenges coexist. Interpretation of the multidimensional data from multi-omics and translation of the data into biological meaningful context remained a challenge. More reasonable experimental designs starting from sowing seed, cultivating the plant, and collecting and extracting samples were necessary for a multi-omics study as the first step. The normalization, transformation, and scaling of single-omics data should consider the integration of multi-omics. This review reports the current study of crops at abiotic stresses in particular heat stress using omics, which will help to accelerate crop improvement to better tolerate and adapt to climate change.

Multi-omics revolution to promote plant breeding efficiency

“…Transcriptomics is the study of “transcriptome” which refers to the entire collection of RNA transcripts generated by an organism’s genome in a cell or tissue ( Zhou et al., 2022a ). Transcriptomics encompasses both mRNAs and ncRNAs in the cells, and it has recently been used extensively in crop breeding to investigate gene expression under different conditions ( Schiessl et al., 2020 ).…”

“…Transcriptome studies also include various kinds of non-coding RNAs. These non-coding RNAs come in many forms, including micro RNAs (miRNAs), circular RNAs (circRNAs), long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), and short interfering RNAs (siRNA), and they thought to be a promising target for crop improvement ( Waititu et al., 2020 ; Zhou et al., 2022a ). These non-coding RNAs perform various functions, such as miRNAs involved in slicing and post-transcriptional modification of target mRNAs.…”

Biotechnological Advances to Improve Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Crops

“…Moreover, mixed strategies of “Omics” and “multi-omics” (including genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and phenomics, among others) have been applied to crops to improve abiotic stress tolerance [ 218 , 219 , 220 , 221 , 222 , 223 , 224 , 225 , 226 , 227 , 228 , 229 , 230 , 231 , 232 , 233 , 234 ].…”

Molecular insights into mechanisms underlying thermo-tolerance in tomato

“…This can also lead to an in-depth understanding of the genetic makeup of plants, signaling cascades and their ability to adapt under multiple stress conditions. The identified genomic regions could be further investigated for stress tolerance in crop plants using the integrated ‘omics’ approaches, wherein, candidate genes are studied in detail via genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and recently emerging artificial emergence (AI) based field phenotyping technology called phenomics ( Bhardwaj et al., 2021 ; Zhou et al., 2022b ). While the genomics approach can be used to discover the putative gene(s) conferring stress tolerance in plants, understanding the function of multiple genes and their complex networks controlling stress tolerance at the phenotypic level would greatly benefit from transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic approaches ( Chaudhary et al., 2019 ).…”