Abiotic Stress Responses and Microbe-Mediated Mitigation in Plants: The Omics Strategies

Abstract

Abiotic stresses are the foremost limiting factors for agricultural productivity. Crop plants need to cope up adverse external pressure created by environmental and edaphic conditions with their intrinsic biological mechanisms, failing which their growth, development, and productivity suffer. Microorganisms, the most natural inhabitants of diverse environments exhibit enormous metabolic capabilities to mitigate abiotic stresses. Since microbial interactions with plants are an integral part of the living ecosystem, they are believed to be the natural partners that modulate local and systemic mechanisms in plants to offer defense under adverse external conditions. Plant-microbe interactions comprise complex mechanisms within the plant cellular system. Biochemical, molecular and physiological studies are paving the way in understanding the complex but integrated cellular processes. Under the continuous pressure of increasing climatic alterations, it now becomes more imperative to define and interpret plant-microbe relationships in terms of protection against abiotic stresses. At the same time, it also becomes essential to generate deeper insights into the stress-mitigating mechanisms in crop plants for their translation in higher productivity. Multi-omics approaches comprising genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics integrate studies on the interaction of plants with microbes and their external environment and generate multi-layered information that can answer what is happening in real-time within the cells. Integration, analysis and decipherization of the big-data can lead to a massive outcome that has significant chance for implementation in the fields. This review summarizes abiotic stresses responses in plants in-terms of biochemical and molecular mechanisms followed by the microbe-mediated stress mitigation phenomenon. We describe the role of multi-omics approaches in generating multi-pronged information to provide a better understanding of plant–microbe interactions that modulate cellular mechanisms in plants under extreme external conditions and help to optimize abiotic stresses. Vigilant amalgamation of these high-throughput approaches supports a higher level of knowledge generation about root-level mechanisms involved in the alleviation of abiotic stresses in organisms.

Plant growth-promoting bacteria effect in withstanding drought in wheat cultivars

“…Rhizobacteria-induced drought endurance and resilience (RIDER) that includes changes in the levels of phytohormones, defense-related proteins and enzymes, antioxidants and epoxypolysaccharide have been observed for microbe-mediated plant responses (MEENA et al, 2017). According to the results of the present work, A. brasilense and H. seropedicae can be considered as RIDERs, since they improved the plants of both genotypes.…”

Plant genotype and temperature impact simultaneous biotic and abiotic stress‐related gene expression in Pythium‐infected plants

“…Such plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses are complex (Rejeb et al , ), involving changes at molecular, cellular, and physiological levels (Atkinson and Urwin, ), and responses to multiple factor‐complexes differ from those for individual stress responses (Pandey et al , ). Of the abiotic stresses, temperature is considered a dominant abiotic stress impeding agriculture productivity (Meena et al , ). Varieties of different resistance/susceptibility show significant differences at both phenotypic and molecular levels when confronted by pathogens (e.g., Ma et al , ; Cregeen et al , ; Kumari et al , ; Tran et al , ).…”

Agrowaste bioconversion and microbial fortification have prospects for soil health, crop productivity, and eco-enterprising

“…with organic matter-rich compost can add to the soil health. Such practices are known to improve crop productivity through diverse mechanisms through nutrient acquisition, mineralization, carbon addition and phytohormone production (Rashid et al 2016;Meena et al 2017). The species of Rhizobium, Azotobacter, Azospirillum, and phosphate solubilizing microorganisms that are currently being used as commercial formulations of biofertilizers, when added in combination with the compost can also provide major support to agriculture (Reddy and Saravanan 2013;Sharma et al 2013).…”