Omics Approaches for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants

Plant growth and productivity are limited by various types of abiotic stresses. While significant advances have been made in understanding the plant adaptation in stress environments, there are still challenges to translate this acquired knowledge for improved crop performance and productivity under stress environments due to complex genetics involving multitude of genes and stress tolerance mechanisms and interaction with numerous environmental factors pose. Different omics technologies have evolved during the last few decades to systematically analyze and correlate the changes in the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome to the variability in plant’s response to abiotic stresses. This chapter will provide an overview of various omics technologies and their application to increase the chances of developing abiotic stress tolerant plants. Although, we foresee significant potential of these innovative tools in making genetic improvement, challenges in integrating the vast amount of high throughput omics data should be overcome to understand the genetic network involved in abiotic stress tolerance.