Editor: Narendra Tuteja

Omics and Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance

eBook: US $74 Special Offer (PDF + Printed Copy): US $156
Printed Copy: US $119
Library License: US $296
ISBN: 978-1-60805-384-1 (Print)
ISBN: 978-1-60805-058-1 (Online)
Year of Publication: 2011
DOI: 10.2174/97816080505811110101

Introduction

Multiple biotic and abiotic environmental factors may constitute stresses that affect plant growth and yield in crop species. Advances in plant physiology, genetics, and molecular biology have greatly improved our understanding of plant responses to stresses. This book details on technologies that have emerged during the past decade and have been useful in studying the multigenicity of the plant abiotic stress response. Upstream molecular mechanisms are involved in the plant response to abiotic stress, above all in the regulation of timings and amount of specific stress responses. Post-transcriptional mechanisms based on alternative splicing and RNA processing, as well as RNA silencing define the actual transcriptome supporting the stress response. Beyond protein phosphorylation, other post-translational modifications like ubiquitination and sumoylation regulate the activation of pre-existing molecules to ensure a prompt response to stress factors.

The text in this book deals with the importance of -omics approaches like Genomics, Metabolomics and Proteomics in abiotic stress tolerance. Large scale analytical approaches provide detailed information about the structure and complexity of signaling networks, identify subsets of genes or activities that are correlated to given stress factors and reveal unexpected or previously uncharacterized biochemical interactions.

To the best of our knowledge no book on -Omics studies in relation to Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance is available in the market. This book should therefore be a valuable asset for the readers.

Foreword

Ten-thousand years of selection have turned wild species into established useful plants. A few hundred years of breeding with evermore sophistication have lead to the generation our extant crops. All of this progress has been achieved by phenotype observation, increasingly augmented by measurements. The concepts of evolutionary change, of genetics and genes, and finally the reality of DNA have been added during the last century. Plant biology and the crop-centered biological sciences as well, profited from the advances, but at the same time many biological disciplines lost sight of the organismic dimension in the pursuit of detail. A large number of plant species with intriguing evolutionary adaptations that had previously been studied were abandoned and replaced by focus on a handful of model species with fervent supporters and fierce detractors. To be sure, the focus on models provided immense new insights into the functioning of plants but the new insights became possible only because of a paradigm change. The steady and incremental advance in knowledge has been replaced by a view of plants as an integrated system of many processes and pathways. The sea change in conceptual approach and high-throughput experimentation has been accomplished by the availability of new technologies. These summarily termed 'omics' concepts have opened a way for evolutionary specialties to be studied and understood in previously unimaginable complexity.

The volume edited by Drs. Narendra Tuteja, Sarvajeet Singh Gill and Renu Tuteja places plant stress tolerance behaviour in this 'omics' context and does it well. The book succeeds in presenting a large variety of concepts, models and viewpoints. The book presents a wealth of excellent articles, both broad overviews as well as detailed accounts that discuss genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics principles aimed at advancing our understanding of plant abiotic stress tolerance phenomena. The chapters, written by experts in their respective fields, cover a large array of topics and interpret our recently dramatically enlarged view of the genetic basis of stressaffected plant development, biochemistry and physiology. The various contributions integrate the stress topic from the view of crop species as well as from the vantage of established models. This comprehensiveness should make this volume equally valuable not only to basic investigators and application-oriented plant scientists but also for teachers and students entering this field of plant biology.

Hans J. Bohnert, Ph.D.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL
USA


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