Systems Approach to Understanding the Biology of Cold Stress Responses in Plants

Cold stress is a major abiotic stress challenge that negatively impacts plant growth, metabolism, development, and productivity. The collective efforts of the scientific community to elucidate the molecular underpinnings of plant responses to cold stress have successfully identified crucial components of the complex, multi-dimensional pathways involved in the regulation of cold stress responses at the level of the cell, tissue, and the whole plant. These include but are not limited to physiological responses, cold sensing, signal perception and transduction, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation, and epigenetic regulation through the function of non-coding RNAs. The important discoveries on the regulatory networks underlying physiological, biochemical, and metabolic responses of plants to low temperature stress have been leveraged into applied research aimed at improving cold tolerance in a range of plant species. Sustaining these incremental gains in cold stress tolerance in plants will be critical in maintaining plant productivity amidst the negative impacts of climate change.

Rapid advances in molecular biology, computational science, and instrumentation have ushered in the ‘omics’ era in life sciences. Massive datasets on pools of biological molecules such as DNA, transcripts, metabolites, or proteins are generated and analyzed to define the structure, function and response of organisms. Because ‘omics’ approaches consider the totality of biological molecules in space and time, the information derived from such strategies can provide a more holistic view of biological systems. In recent years, genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and lipidomics studies have been increasingly used by scientists to understand the responses of plants to abiotic stress, such as cold, in a more integrated and systems-wide manner. Understanding the interactions of interdependent regulatory hubs involved in cold stress responses will be critical in continuing efforts for cold tolerance improvement in plants.
This Research Topic aims to put together current knowledge about the integration of omics technologies in understanding cold stress responses in plants at the systems level.We welcome manuscripts in the form of original research, reviews, and mini-reviews on:
• Application of ‘omics’ (i.e. genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, proteomics) approach in understanding cold stress responses at the cell, tissue, or whole organism level of food, feed, fiber, vegetable, and ornamental crops
• Development of bioinformatics pipelines to analyze ‘omics’ datasets on cold stress responses in plants
• Germplasm characterization to identify sources of cold tolerance in plants using various ‘omics’ approaches

Descriptive studies reporting responses of growth, yield, or quality to cold stress will not be considered if they do not progress physiological understanding of these responses. Including:

i) Descriptive collection of transcripts, proteins or metabolites, including comparative sets as a result of different conditions or treatments;
ii) Descriptive studies that only define gene families using basic phylogenetics and the assignment of cursory functional attributions (e.g. expression profiles, hormone or metabolites levels, promoter analysis, informatic parameters).