This Research Topic is part of the article collection series -
Omics-Driven Crop Improvement for Stress ToleranceClimate 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.
The aim of this research topic is to emphasize the power of new technologies and big data. We encourage studies that show how new technologies cope with the challenges and bring the advances of functional genes and loci for plant tolerance improvement identified by new omics analysis. We welcome submissions of all article types accepted in Frontiers in Plant Science on the following themes but not limited to:
• Integration with multi-omics revealing the complex genetic regulatory networks and hub genes controlling the mechanisms of stress tolerance
• Development of system biology approaches integrated with multi-omics data analysis for crop improvement for stress tolerance, software or algorithm are both in demand
• Genetic regulatory network and model analysis about abiotic and biotic stress response
• New functional gene or genetic loci identified for stresses tolerance based on omics assay
• Omics approach on pests and pathogens that will enlighten our understanding of plant response to biotic stresses.
Please note that comparative omic analyses that only report a collection of differentially expressed e.g., genes/metabolites/proteins, some validated by qPCR under different conditions or treatments, will not be considered for review. They can be considered if extended to provide meaningful insights into gene/protein function and/or the biology of the subject described.