Chapter 8 - Integrated omics approaches for nutrient stress management in plants

Abstract

There are at least 17 nutrients that plants need to thrive. Mineral nutrients, in addition to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, are primarily taken up by roots from soils. Most plant-needing minerals are in short supply in natural soils, making it difficult to grow healthy crops. A deeper understanding of crop responses to mineral nutrient deprivation is necessary for the development of crops with high nutrient efficiency, which is crucial for sustainable agriculture. In the fast-progressing postgenome age, proteomic methods offer a significant as well as a supplementary instrument for the analysis of the molecular processes underlying the plant’s response to mineral nutrient deficits. Changes in growth, production, and stress caused by abiotic stress might affect a plant’s existence. Secondary metabolites accumulate in plants as a result of adaptations to several environmental pressures that induce dramatic alterations in plant development, physiology, and metabolism. Now, more than ever, it is crucial to describe and understand plant–microbe connections in terms of protection against abiotic stressors in the face of persistent and intensifying environmental shifts. Concurrently, it becomes crucial to learn more about how agricultural plants deal with stress so that this knowledge may be applied to increasing crop yields. Studies of plant–microbe interactions and environmental factors may be integrated into multiomics techniques that include genomes, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics to provide information with several layers that can explain what is happening in cells at any given moment. Integration, analysis, and interpretation of big data can yield a gigantic result with high potential for practical use. This chapter looks at the omics method for studying how plants react to environmental stress, with a particular emphasis on medicinal plants. The challenges of integrating it into a systems biology approach for the development of crops with high mineral nutrient efficiency are one of the topics that will be covered. This also explains how interactions between plants and microbes, which can alter biological pathways in plants despite adverse environmental conditions circumstances and aid in optimizing how they respond to abiotic challenges, may be studied using multiomics methodologies that provide multifaceted information. Consciously combining various high-throughput methods facilitates the production of more in-depth information concerning the fundamental mechanisms involved in the amelioration of abiotic stressors in organisms.