About this Research Topic

Background

Plants are often exposed to adverse growing environments, such as drought, salinity, heat, and chilling stresses, which affect plant growth and development resulting in low yield and even plant death. As we know, secondary metabolites can help plants to stop enemies, fight pathogens, replace their competitors and go beyond environmental restraints. These compounds are biosynthesized under variable stress patterns, thus associated with the survival strategies of plants. Stress responses of plants are complex biological processes subject to multi-levels of regulations, including alterations in the amounts of metabolites and expression changes of genes for morphological and physiological adaptation. Accordingly, metabolites like phenolics, terpenoids, and flavonoids are found to be crucial for growth, stress tolerance, and plant defense. With the development of functional genomics and multi-omics, many of these secondary metabolites and their biosynthetic pathways have been identified in the plant kingdom. Exploring how plants respond and adapt to adverse environments is of great importance not only for the fundamental understanding of environmental adaptation but also for generating stress-tolerant crop plants.

The aim of this Research Topic is to highlight fundamental discoveries about potential metabolites involved in abiotic stresses and adaptation strategies and events signaling the mediation of stress-induced metabolic changes from the perspective of functional genomics and multi-omics studies.

We welcome submissions of original research papers, reviews, methods, and opinions, including (but not limited to) research on the following sub-themes:

1. The molecular mechanism of plant secondary metabolite biosynthesis and accumulation in response to an adverse environment based on functional genomics.
2. The effect of environmental factors on secondary metabolites in plants using genomic approaches.
3. Functional characterization of novel secondary metabolism pathways and genes.
4. The evolution of plant secondary metabolism pathway associated with environment adaptation through comparative genomics.
5. The methods to enhance the environmental adaptation of plants from the view of genomics and metabolomics.
6. The multi-omics studies of secondary metabolites provide insight into the mechanism of plant adaptation.

Please note that descriptive studies and those defining gene families or descriptive collections of transcripts, proteins, or metabolites, will not be considered for review unless they are expanded and provide mechanistic and/or physiological insights into the biological system or process being studied. Additionally, the manuscripts would not be accepted for those studies which lack plant genomics.

Keywords: Plant secondary metabolite, plant environment interaction, functional genomics, molecular genetic mechanism, environmental adaptation, multi-omics studies

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