An Overview of Abiotic Stress in Cereal Crops: Negative Impacts, Regulation, Biotechnology and Integrated Omics

Rajendran Jeyasri,Lakkakula Satish,Jen-Tsung Chen,Sunny Ahmar,Pandiyan Muthuramalingam,Shunmugiah Karutha Pandian,Manikandan Ramesh,Xiukang Wang,Freddy Mora-Poblete

doi:10.3390/plants10071472

Abstract

Abiotic stresses (AbS), such as drought, salinity, and thermal stresses, could highly affect the growth and development of plants. For decades, researchers have attempted to unravel the mechanisms of AbS for enhancing the corresponding tolerance of plants, especially for crop production in agriculture. In the present communication, we summarized the significant factors (atmosphere, soil and water) of AbS, their regulations, and integrated omics in the most important cereal crops in the world, especially rice, wheat, sorghum, and maize. It has been suggested that using systems biology and advanced sequencing approaches in genomics could help solve the AbS response in cereals. An emphasis was given to holistic approaches such as, bioinformatics and functional omics, gene mining and agronomic traits, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and transcription factors (TFs) family with respect to AbS. In addition, the development of omics studies has improved to address the identification of AbS responsive genes and it enables the interaction between signaling pathways, molecular insights, novel traits and their significance in cereal crops. This review compares AbS mechanisms to omics and bioinformatics resources to provide a comprehensive view of the mechanisms. Moreover, further studies are needed to obtain the information from the integrated omics databases to understand the AbS mechanisms for the development of large spectrum AbS-tolerant crop production.

Highlights

Cereals are grasses cultivated for the edible components of the grain
Functional genomic approaches provide new opportunities to unravel the functional roles of Abiotic stresses (AbS) responsive genes, enabling the identification of genes and generation of stress-tolerant plants especially on important cereal crops [64]
With the advent of newly developed functional omics can be broadly categorized into two potential approaches used in manipulating gene-pool for enhancing the AbS tolerance, which contains: (i) identification of stress-responsive genes followed by genetic engineering to improve the stress tolerant cereals development and (ii) mining of marker associated with agronomically important genes and their use in marker-assisted breeding programs

Summary

Introduction

Cereals are grasses (a monocot family Poaceae, known as Gramineae) cultivated for the edible components of the grain. Excess salinity in the soil is one of the major abiotic stress factors that affect the growth and productivity of a wide variety of crops including rice. Functional genomic approaches provide new opportunities to unravel the functional roles of AbS responsive genes, enabling the identification of genes and generation of stress-tolerant plants especially on important cereal crops [64]. With the advent of newly developed functional omics can be broadly categorized into two potential approaches used in manipulating gene-pool for enhancing the AbS tolerance, which contains: (i) identification of stress-responsive genes followed by genetic engineering to improve the stress tolerant cereals development and (ii) mining of marker associated with agronomically important genes and their use in marker-assisted breeding programs. New advances in omics such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics will have an essential advantage in the bio-fortification processes in plants

Gene Mining

Transcript Signature Usage in Stress Responsive Gene Mining

Identification of Genes and Their Agronomic Traits

Findings

Conclusions and Future Perspectives