About this Research Topic
No topic is more relevant and urgent to agriculture today than the unpredictable and potentially massive impacts of climate change on plant productivity, particularly on food crops. Global warming is already having far-reaching effects on agricultural production, food security, and human well-being.
Crop production depends greatly on the environmental quality and ecosystem state. Recent technological developments in biological sciences, including that in omics approaches, offer novel insights into crop stress physiology, propelling plant biology research and providing exciting new tools for plant improvement. Ecometabolomics is a promising strategy for understanding the metabolic basis of the stress response, resistance, and resilience of plants and agroecosystems. Understanding the metabolic pathways regulating the responses of plants to abiotic stress is a fundamental goal in plant biology. The changes in plant metabolic profiles triggered by stress need to be illuminated to comprehend the impacts of global warming on ecosystem health and to guide the rational development of next-generation crops that maintain productivity under the changing climate.
To date, the knowledge of the ecometabolomic basis underlying important agronomical traits in farmed plants and food crops remains poor. This research topic aims to shed the much-needed light on the metabolic characteristics of stress-tolerant plants. This knowledge can ultimately be leveraged in the development of new plant varieties that can be cultivated under adverse conditions. The goal of this research topic is to highlight the use of ecometabolomics as a tool to tackle the effects of climate change and investigate the metabolic basis of crop resilience. Studies that explore ecometabolomic responses of plants to any of the three key consequences of climate change – drought, atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment, and high temperature – are invited.
We welcome research and method papers, reviews, and mini-reviews that employ ecometabolomics to study plant responses, adaptation, and resilience in the changing climate and uncover the metabolic signatures of stress tolerance and their underlying mechanistic basis. Examples of topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Effects of climate change on metabolome fluxes in crops (e.g., environmental stoichiometric and metabolomic shifts).
• Crop ecological metabolomics (e.g., metabolomic analysis of plant–environment interactions or as a tool for ecological studies).
• Metabolic mechanisms and regulatory networks in crop plants under climate change, including high CO2, heat and water stress
• Metabolomic networks in trophic, plant–environment, and plant–soil interactions.
• Ecometabolomics and improvement of plant resistance/resilience traits that maximize plant performance in unstable environments.
• Dynamics, fates and roles of primary and secondary metabolites in crop plants under environmental stress.
Please note that purely descriptive studies that do not advance our mechanistic understanding of the ecometabolomic aspects of stress biology in crop plants will not be considered.
Crop production depends greatly on the environmental quality and ecosystem state. Recent technological developments in biological sciences, including that in omics approaches, offer novel insights into crop stress physiology, propelling plant biology research and providing exciting new tools for plant improvement. Ecometabolomics is a promising strategy for understanding the metabolic basis of the stress response, resistance, and resilience of plants and agroecosystems. Understanding the metabolic pathways regulating the responses of plants to abiotic stress is a fundamental goal in plant biology. The changes in plant metabolic profiles triggered by stress need to be illuminated to comprehend the impacts of global warming on ecosystem health and to guide the rational development of next-generation crops that maintain productivity under the changing climate.
To date, the knowledge of the ecometabolomic basis underlying important agronomical traits in farmed plants and food crops remains poor. This research topic aims to shed the much-needed light on the metabolic characteristics of stress-tolerant plants. This knowledge can ultimately be leveraged in the development of new plant varieties that can be cultivated under adverse conditions. The goal of this research topic is to highlight the use of ecometabolomics as a tool to tackle the effects of climate change and investigate the metabolic basis of crop resilience. Studies that explore ecometabolomic responses of plants to any of the three key consequences of climate change – drought, atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment, and high temperature – are invited.
We welcome research and method papers, reviews, and mini-reviews that employ ecometabolomics to study plant responses, adaptation, and resilience in the changing climate and uncover the metabolic signatures of stress tolerance and their underlying mechanistic basis. Examples of topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Effects of climate change on metabolome fluxes in crops (e.g., environmental stoichiometric and metabolomic shifts).
• Crop ecological metabolomics (e.g., metabolomic analysis of plant–environment interactions or as a tool for ecological studies).
• Metabolic mechanisms and regulatory networks in crop plants under climate change, including high CO2, heat and water stress
• Metabolomic networks in trophic, plant–environment, and plant–soil interactions.
• Ecometabolomics and improvement of plant resistance/resilience traits that maximize plant performance in unstable environments.
• Dynamics, fates and roles of primary and secondary metabolites in crop plants under environmental stress.
Please note that purely descriptive studies that do not advance our mechanistic understanding of the ecometabolomic aspects of stress biology in crop plants will not be considered.
Keywords: Society Affiliation RT
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