Abstract
Abiotic stresses are among the principal limiting factors for productivity in agriculture. In the current era of continuous climate changes, the understanding of the molecular aspects involved in abiotic stress response in plants is a priority. The rise of -omics approaches provides key strategies to promote effective research in the field, facilitating the investigations from reference models to an increasing number of species, tolerant and sensitive genotypes. Integrated multilevel approaches, based on molecular investigations at genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics levels, are now feasible, expanding the opportunities to clarify key molecular aspects involved in responses to abiotic stresses. To this aim, bioinformatics has become fundamental for data production, mining and integration, and necessary for extracting valuable information and for comparative efforts, paving the way to the modeling of the involved processes. We provide here an overview of bioinformatics resources for research on plant abiotic stresses, describing collections from -omics efforts in the field, ranging from raw data to complete databases or platforms, highlighting opportunities and still open challenges in abiotic stress research based on -omics technologies.
Highlights
Plants display an amazing diversity and, owing to their sessile nature, they evolved a broad range of molecular mechanisms to respond to complex network of environmental signals, which activate multiple pathways, modulated by different responsive genes, in case conferring tolerance to the pressure determined by stressor factors [1,2,3]
In this review, after a brief introduction of the main technologies that are accompanying the production of massive molecular data, we provide an overview of major bioinformatics data resources available in support of plant research, and on abiotic stress responses, ranging from raw collections, to complete databases or platforms
Parrine et al described proteome alterations on Solanum lycopersicum under high light stress and found a significant change in PSII complex proteins [213]; while a shotgun proteomic approach was applied by Jozefovicz et al [214] to understand plant responses to nitrogen deficiency in two different varieties of Solanum tuberosum: in this work, differences between the two varieties were found to be strongly associated with protein catabolism, defense mechanisms as well as protein and amino acid synthesis metabolism
Summary
Plants display an amazing diversity and, owing to their sessile nature, they evolved a broad range of molecular mechanisms to respond to complex network of environmental signals, which activate multiple pathways, modulated by different responsive genes, in case conferring tolerance to the pressure determined by stressor factors [1,2,3]. Inexpert users must be aware of basics from the field to profitable handle, analyze and compare data from the available resources, to obtain novel insights into the organization and functionality of the biological systems To this aim, in this review, after a brief introduction of the main technologies that are accompanying the production of massive molecular data, we provide an overview of major bioinformatics data resources available in support of plant research, and on abiotic stress responses, ranging from raw collections, to complete databases or platforms. We will describe the open challenges to increase and improve the opportunities offered by bioinformatics for innovative and effective research in the field
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