Exploring the Adaptive Responses of Plants to Abiotic Stresses Using Transcriptome Data

Abstract

In recent decades, global climate change and heavy metal stress have severely affected plant growth and biomass, which has led to a serious threat to food safety and human health. Anthropogenic activities, the rapid pace of urbanization, and the use of modern agricultural technologies have further aggravated environmental conditions, resulting in limited crop growth and productivity. This review highlights the various adaptive transcriptomic responses of plants to tolerate detrimental environmental conditions, such as drought, salinity, and heavy metal contamination. These stresses hinder plant growth and development by disrupting their physiological and biochemical processes by inducing oxidative stress, nutritional imbalance, and osmotic disturbance, and by deteriorating their photosynthetic machinery. Plants have developed different strategies to safeguard themselves against the toxic effects of these environmental stresses. They stimulate their secondary messenger to activate cell signaling, and they trigger other numerous transcriptomic responses associated with plant defense mechanisms. Therefore, the recent advances in biological sciences, such as transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics, have assisted our understanding of the stress-tolerant strategies adopted by plants, which could be further utilized to breed tolerant species. This review summarizes the stress-tolerant strategies of crops by covering the role of transcriptional factors in plants.

RETRACTED: Cytokinin and abiotic stress tolerance -What has been accomplished and the way forward?

“…Stresses caused by drought, heat, cold, and salt all induce an increase in the quantity of Ca 2+ (signal molecules) that enters the cytoplasm of the cell from either its own reserves or an apoplastic source. One form of sensor for the stress signals is thought to be the passages that govern Ca 2+ entrance ( Aftab et al, 2021 ; Javaid et al, 2022 ; Paes de Melo et al, 2022 ). Other than Ca 2+ , ROS and nitric oxide (NO) are other messenger molecules involved in inducing plant response to cold stress.…”

Transcriptome Characterization and Gene Changes Induced by Fusarium solani in Sweetpotato Roots

“…A series of reactions are induced by the pathogen in the host, causing resistance to the pathogen infection. RNA-seq can be used for the discovery of new genes, the identification of candidate gene families, transcription mapping, metabolic pathway determination, and evolutionary analysis [39,40]. The understanding of the complex physiological and molecular mechanisms induced by biological stresses, especially Fusarium infection, in sweetpotato roots remains limited [28,41].…”

Biotechnological Advances to Improve Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Crops

“…Moreover, mixed strategies of “Omics” and “multi-omics” (including genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and phenomics, among others) have been applied to crops to improve abiotic stress tolerance [ 218 , 219 , 220 , 221 , 222 , 223 , 224 , 225 , 226 , 227 , 228 , 229 , 230 , 231 , 232 , 233 , 234 ].…”