Recent progress in the use of ‘omics technologies in brassicaceous vegetables

Abstract

Continuing advances in ‘omics methodologies and instrumentation is enhancing the understanding of how plants cope with the dynamic nature of their growing environment. ‘Omics platforms have been only recently extended to cover horticultural crop species. Many of the most widely cultivated vegetable crops belong to the genus Brassica: these include plants grown for their root (turnip, rutabaga/swede), their swollen stem base (kohlrabi), their leaves (cabbage, kale, pak choi) and their inflorescence (cauliflower, broccoli). Characterization at the genome, transcript, protein and metabolite levels has illustrated the complexity of the cellular response to a whole series of environmental stresses, including nutrient deficiency, pathogen attack, heavy metal toxicity, cold acclimation, and excessive and sub-optimal irradiation. This review covers recent applications of ‘omics technologies to the brassicaceous vegetables, and discusses future scenarios in achieving improvements in crop end-use quality.

A review: what is the spermosphere and how can it be studied?

“…For example, these approaches have been developed on the genus Brassica to characterize their associated microbiome (Witzel et al . ) and to understand the complex interactions between plants and arbuscular mychorrhizal fungi, which are ubiquitous symbionts of plant roots (Salvioli and Bonfante ).…”

“…This systems-biology approach enables the conception of networks that could manage, organize and integrate the huge amount of multilevel molecular data. For example, these approaches have been developed on the genus Brassica to characterize their associated microbiome (Witzel et al 2015) and to understand the complex interactions between plants and arbuscular mychorrhizal fungi, which are ubiquitous symbionts of plant roots (Salvioli and Bonfante 2013).…”

FusariumWilt in Banana: Epidemics and Management Strategies

“…However, the data must be validated to minimize the possibility of getting false-positive results which may affect the whole study [140]. Moving forward, it is expected that the combination between omics technology and plant breeding will generate a huge impact on crop improvement [144]. From the review done by Zhang et al [145], multi-"omics" analyses will be the next level of omics approaches as it is able to provide more discrete and testable biological hypotheses from a large scale of high-throughput datasets.…”

Omics Approach to Identify Factors Involved inBrassicaDisease Resistance

“…Regardless its chemical nature, probes have to hybridize very specific sequences and thus their design requires a basic knowledge of the genomic sequence of the species. For this reason the use of microarray technology has been limited to model organisms for years (Witzel et al, 2015). In the particular case of Brassica spp.…”

“…This analysis provides the phenotypical response at the metabolic level under a particular environmental condition or stress. It is considered a very ambitious field due to the high number of chemically distinct molecules present in a typical plant sample, estimated to be at least 100,000 (Witzel et al, 2015). As stated by Sardans et al (2011), metabolomics provides a better analysis of the different response capacities conferred by the phenotypic plasticity of each species, allowing ascertaining what metabolic pathways are involved in a phenotypic response.…”