Omics-Driven Crop Improvement for Stress Tolerance, volume II

Book excerpt: Climate change and global warming are arising threats to ecology and agriculture, and the biotic and abiotic stresses on crop cultivation are becoming more severe. Simultaneously, hunger and poverty remain widespread around the world and are rather thriving with the global population increases, over-fertilization, and land degradation. Rising challenges therefore make the adaptation of agriculture to the environment even more pivotal. Plant tolerance against various stress, including abiotic and biotic stresses mostly, is a classic topic and also a hot spot, of which the goal is to provide possibilities to improve the crops’ sustainability in coping with varied environments. Sustainable crop improvement can help feed the growing population in such an era of shrinking arable land and dwindling water resources. Worldwide, the inexorable exposure of plants to the environment makes crops always come to cross biotic and abiotic stresses, which constantly affect the food supply. Scientists have devoted efforts to improve crop resistance against devastating stressors such as drought, salt, nutrition deprivation, pests and pathogens, etc., and save yields from destruction. With the explosive development of omics technologies, e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, interactomics, and phenomics, crop improvement is embarking on a fire-new bioinformatics era. The integration of multi-omics will provide new perspectives to understand the intricate nature of stress response in crops