Lipidomics-Assisted GWAS (lGWAS) Approach for Improving High-Temperature Stress Tolerance of Crops

Abstract

High-temperature stress (HT) over crop productivity is an important environmental factor demanding more attention as recent global warming trends are alarming and pose a potential threat to crop production. According to the Sixth IPCC report, future years will have longer warm seasons and frequent heat waves. Thus, the need arises to develop HT-tolerant genotypes that can be used to breed high-yielding crops. Several physiological, biochemical, and molecular alterations are orchestrated in providing HT tolerance to a genotype. One mechanism to counter HT is overcoming high-temperature-induced membrane superfluidity and structural disorganizations. Several HT lipidomic studies on different genotypes have indicated the potential involvement of membrane lipid remodelling in providing HT tolerance. Advances in high-throughput analytical techniques such as tandem mass spectrometry have paved the way for large-scale identification and quantification of the enormously diverse lipid molecules in a single run. Physiological trait-based breeding has been employed so far to identify and select HT tolerant genotypes but has several disadvantages, such as the genotype-phenotype gap affecting the efficiency of identifying the underlying genetic association. Tolerant genotypes maintain a high photosynthetic rate, stable membranes, and membrane-associated mechanisms. In this context, studying the HT-induced membrane lipid remodelling, resultant of several up-/down-regulations of genes and post-translational modifications, will aid in identifying potential lipid biomarkers for HT tolerance/susceptibility. The identified lipid biomarkers (LIPIDOTYPE) can thus be considered an intermediate phenotype, bridging the gap between genotype–phenotype (genotype–LIPIDOTYPE–phenotype). Recent works integrating metabolomics with quantitative genetic studies such as GWAS (mGWAS) have provided close associations between genotype, metabolites, and stress-tolerant phenotypes. This review has been sculpted to provide a potential workflow that combines MS-based lipidomics and the robust GWAS (lipidomics assisted GWAS-lGWAS) to identify membrane lipid remodelling related genes and associations which can be used to develop HS tolerant genotypes with enhanced membrane thermostability (MTS) and heat stable photosynthesis (HP).

Nanoscale simulation of the thylakoid membrane response to extreme temperatures

“…Beyond headgroups, desaturating lipid acyl tails is known to induce better thermotolerance (Pranneshraj et al, 2022), and there is some evidence from our study that this may be a more active modification mechanism. Measures of the lipid order parameter, which quantifies in part the rigidity of the lipid tail, decreases with temperature and is much higher for unsaturated tails (Figure S5).…”

Nanoscale Simulation of the Thylakoid Membrane Response to Extreme Temperatures

“…24,25 It is possible that the stroma thylakoids reduce in volume and cannot support the grana structure anymore, leading to dissociation of the grana thylakoid stacks from each other as previously reported. 24,25 Beyond headgroups, desaturating lipid acyl tails is known to induce better thermotolerance, 91 and there is some evidence from our study that this may be a more active modification mechanism. Measures of the lipid order parameter, which quantifies in part the rigidity of the lipid tail, decreases with temperature and is much higher for unsaturated tails (Fig- ure S5).…”

Multi-Omics Pipeline and Omics-Integration Approach to Decipher Plant’s Abiotic Stress Tolerance Responses

“…Lipidome describes the whole profile of lipids in the cellular, tissue or organ level of an organism. Lipidomics is an emerging field of science that studies the structure and function of the lipidome as well as their interactions with other lipids, proteins and metabolites [ 256 ]. Lipids play a dual role in plants’ abiotic stress response.…”

“…Sun et al [ 263 ] identified the leaf lipid profile in Begonia and its alterations under heat stress, which helps to understand the stress adaptive mechanism in plants. The lipidomics process may be paired with MS-based methods and robust GWAS (lipidomics-aided GWAS or LiA-GWAS) to find membrane lipid remodelling-associated genes and likely relationships that may be exploited to generate stress-tolerant plants [ 256 ]. However, because of its complexity and specificity, lipidomics studies are complicated and quite challenging.…”