Stress combinations and their interactions in plants database: a one‐stop resource on combined stress responses in plants

Abstract

SUMMARYWe have developed a compendium and interactive platform, named Stress Combinations and their Interactions in Plants Database (SCIPDb; http://www.nipgr.ac.in/scipdb.php), which offers information on morpho‐physio‐biochemical (phenome) and molecular (transcriptome and metabolome) responses of plants to different stress combinations. SCIPDb is a plant stress informatics hub for data mining on phenome, transcriptome, trait‐gene ontology, and data‐driven research for advancing mechanistic understanding of combined stress biology. We analyzed global phenome data from 939 studies to delineate the effects of various stress combinations on yield in major crops and found that yield was substantially affected under abiotic–abiotic stresses. Transcriptome datasets from 36 studies hosted in SCIPDb identified novel genes, whose roles have not been earlier established in combined stress. Integretome analysis under combined drought–heat stress pinpointed carbohydrate, amino acid, and energy metabolism pathways as the crucial metabolic, proteomic, and transcriptional components in plant tolerance to combined stress. These examples illustrate the application of SCIPDb in identifying novel genes and pathways involved in combined stress tolerance. Further, we showed the application of this database in identifying novel candidate genes and pathways for combined drought and pathogen stress tolerance. To our knowledge, SCIPDb is the only publicly available platform offering combined stress‐specific omics big data visualization tools, such as an interactive scrollbar, stress matrix, radial tree, global distribution map, meta‐phenome analysis, search, BLAST, transcript expression pattern table, Manhattan plot, and co‐expression network. These tools facilitate a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying plant responses to combined stresses.

Creating Climate-Resilient Crops by Increasing Drought, Heat, and Salt Tolerance

“…Plants have evolved stress tolerance mechanisms by which they can adjust themselves to survive under stressful conditions in nature [48,49]. These adjustments are crucial to plants, which integrate complex pathways at morphological, physiological, molecular, and biochemical levels.…”

“…Although much progress has been made in identifying genes that play important roles in conferring abiotic stress tolerance over the last 30 years, almost none of these genes have been successfully utilized to improve crop yield in field conditions. The failure in translating successful results from laboratory experiments into real gains in crop yield is likely due to the following two reasons: one, the increased tolerance by overexpressing those "stress tolerance" genes is still not powerful enough to overcome the real stress that transgenic plants encounter in the field; two, the stresses that transgenic plants face are too complex that transgenic plants could not handle them, as abiotic stresses usually come in combinations [39,48]. For example, heat stress tends to lead to drought stress in arid and semiarid regions, as heat stress increases transpiration, leading plants to lose water faster; the application of fertilizers in arid and semiarid regions often results in soil salinization, leading to combined drought and salt stress conditions [49,129].…”

Editorial: The past, present and future of The Plant Journal Resource Articles

“…To assess this Bonnot et al examined whether temperature stress and the time of day impact the gene expression dynamics in cold-sensitive and tolerant and heat-sensitive and tolerant sorghum genotypes finding that time of day is highly influencing the temperature stress responses (Bonnot et al, 2023). On the same subject is the Stress combinations and their Interactions in Plants Database (SCIPDb) published by Priya et al (2023). This database collates information on morpho-physio biochemical (phenome) and molecular (transcriptome and metabolome) responses of 40 plants to different stress combinations.…”

Drought: A context‐dependent damper and aggravator of plant diseases

“…Recurrent drought also broadens pathogen niches, resulting in attacks on new host species and the onset of disease outbreaks in diverse regions (Dudney et al, 2021). Despite these implications, climate‐ready crop research constitutes a mere 0.02% of global scientific output (http://www.nipgr.ac.in/scipdb.php) (Priya et al, 2023). This review aims to guide research efforts in line with the important Sustainable Development Goal 13 (SDG‐13) on climate change (https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal13).…”