Omics to address the opportunities and challenges of nanotechnology in agriculture

Abstract

Increasing global food demand, and risks associated with climate change and agrochemicals demand novel and sustainable agricultural practices to improve crop yield and quality. Various strategies using nanotechnology have been explored widely to provide solutions. However, their application in the food industry is constrained by limited understanding of nanomaterial safety. Growing interest in the potential of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in agricultural applications has also resulted in increased crop exposure, leading to unknown risks to plants, animals and humans. Recently, considerable research has been carried out on overt plant response to ENMs; however, conclusive mechanistic information is lacking. With advancements in hyphenated analytical techniques, research on ENM-biota interactions has witnessed a paradigm shift from low-throughput, single end-point bioassays to high-throughput, discovery-oriented omic tools, including transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. This review summarizes the pioneering studies utilizing omics in plants exposed to ENMs to explain phenotypic expressions and elucidate associated biological pathways. Advantages and challenges of current analytical techniques employed in proteomics and metabolomics are also discussed. We acknowledge the need for integration and application of multiomics to identify sensitive biomarkers in plants in response to ENMs, and provide mechanistic insights, in order to design enhanced and safer nano-enabled products for agriculture.

Nanoimpact in Plants: Lessons from the Transcriptome

“…Thus, transcriptional data covering a range of species for which genomics tools are fully developed are available to assess for nanoimpact on plants. Omics technologies have the power to shift the research on plant-NP interactions from low-throughput, single end-point bioassays to high-throughput discovery [42].…”

Metabolic Alterations in Pisum sativum Roots during Plant Growth and Arbuscular Mycorrhiza Development

“…Recently, a paradigm has been shifted from low-throughput, single end-point bioassays to systemic biology approaches. Thus, researchers have been employing so-called ‘omic’ tools, including transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Metabolomics is a particularly powerful tool for discovering how a plant’s physiological/biochemical status varies under different environmental conditions [ 13 , 14 ].…”

Molecular Mechanisms of Nanomaterial-Bacterial Interactions Revealed by Omics—The Role of Nanomaterial Effect Level

“…Progress in genome sequencing, mass spectroscopy, bioinformatics and correlating genome annotations with functional information has enabled implementation of omics methods in environmental toxicology, including nanotoxicology ( Costa and Fadeel, 2016 ). Advantages of omics techniques in nanotoxicology have been reviewed from human and environmental safety and risk assessment perspectives ( Costa and Fadeel, 2016 ; Fröhlich, 2017 ; Revel et al, 2017 ; Fadeel et al, 2018 ; Majumdar and Keller, 2020 ), but a systematic overview of recent progress in omics methods used for elucidating ENM effects on bacteria is lacking. Due to the differences in cell structure and physiology of eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms, mechanisms of interactions between bacteria and ENMs are expected to be different from those between animal or plant cells and ENMs ( Wang et al, 2016 , 2018a ; Westmeier et al, 2018 ), and thus need special scrutiny.…”