Chapter 14 - Current understanding of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics of crop plants under salt stress

Abstract

Salinity is predicted to damage more than 20% of all irrigated land in the world at this time, and this tendency is accelerating due to excessive irrigation water use as well as rapid climatic changes. Among abiotic stresses, the most cataclysmic one is salt stress, which leads to ion toxicity, and osmotic stress has pessimistic impacts on agricultural productivity in several ways. A high amount of salt in irrigation water or soil leads to significant negative effects on the catabolism and anabolism of plants by upsetting cellular homeostasis and decoupling critical biochemical and physiological processes. Having these destructive effects, there is a crucial task for plant biologists to scrutinize various approaches that help in the development of crop plants that are salt tolerant. Thus, to combat the effects of salt stress, omics approaches play a vital role. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics together help in the identification of novel genes, RNA, and protein and secondary metabolites, respectively, produced by plants, which provide tolerance to crop plants against salt toxicity. Here, in this chapter, we have discussed various techniques of omics approaches and different important crop plants and their associated primary and secondary metabolites, which provide adaptation against this devastating stress. These omics approaches proved to be bloom in conferring salt resistance.