Tackling the Heat-Stress Tolerance in Crop Plants: A Bioinformatics Approach

Abstract

Plants are exposed to different types of environmental factors including heat stress that affect negatively various regular activities of the plant. Plants, as sessile organisms, must have developed efficient strategies of response to cope with and adapt to different types of abiotic stresses imposed by the adverse environment. Plant responses to environmental stress are complex and appear to be a difficult task to study in the classical plant-breeding program due to several technical limitations. The current knowledge of the regulatory network governing environmental stress responses is fragmentary, and an understanding of the damage caused by these environmental stresses or the plant’s tolerance mechanisms to deal with stress-induced damages is far from complete. The emergence of the novel “omics” technologies from the last few years, such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, is now allowing researchers to enable active analyses of regulatory networks that control abiotic stress responses. Recent advances in different omics approaches have been found greatly useful in understanding plant responses to abiotic stress conditions. Such analyses increase our knowledge on plant responses and adaptation to stress conditions and allow improving crop improvement programs including plant breeding. In this chapter, recent progresses on systematic analyses of plant responses to heat stress including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics and transgenic-based approaches to overcome heat stress are summarized.