About this Research Topic

Background

The scientific community is currently focusing on climate resilience to ensure food and nutritional security. Understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying stress response is the key to tweaking the key regulators for enhancing this trait. Climate resilience is a dynamic process controlled by transcriptional and epigenetic regulators. Therefore, it is imperative to study transcriptional changes and epigenetic modifications regulating stress responses and manipulate candidate genes/alleles/QTLs/mQTLs to achieve biotic and abiotic stress resilience. To recognize the full landscape of variations driving these phenotypic changes, multi-omics approaches must be used to understand these factors, along with genetic variations.

To feed the ever-growing population and tackle the uncertainties in environmental changes, deploying genomics and sequencing is a viable solution. Plant cells must modify their chromatin states and adjust their transcriptional profile to respond better to environmental stimuli. These chromatin modifications include DNA methylation, histone variants, post-transcriptional histone modifications, and variations in non-coding RNA activities. Exploring transcriptional dynamics and epigenetic changes simultaneously with the natural variations present in the population/sub-population is necessary. This will provide us with a full picture of different mechanisms driving the phenotypic changes and will help in developing better resilient varieties by utilizing this multi-omics-driven knowledge.

This Research Topic provides researchers with the opportunity to publish the outcomes of their research and reviews focusing on understanding transcriptomic and epigenetic changes in response to different environmental conditions. We invite authors to submit their original research and reviews including validation of the results presented in the study.

We invite submissions on the below, but not limited to, topics:

- Short-read or long-read transcriptome sequencing to find expression level changes in genes/transcripts associated with abiotic stresses.

- Epigenetic studies identifying epigenetic modifications including DNA methylation, histone modification, etc., under different abiotic stress conditions.

- Identification of transcription factors associated with adaptation to abiotic stresses.

- Gene family analysis to identify genes linked to abiotic stresses.

- Gene network analysis to identify stress-responsive genes and genetic regulators.

- Development of user-friendly databases to browse and mine the important genes/transcription factors linked to abiotic stresses in plant species.

Disclaimer: 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 only be considered if extended to provide meaningful insights into gene/protein function and/or the biology of the subject described.

Keywords: transcriptional, epigenetic responses, gene network analysis, plant abiotic stress, DNA, RNA

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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