Molecular technologies ending with ‘omics’: The driving force toward sustainable plant production and protection

Abstract

As the global population is surging, the agricultural industry is required to meet the food demand while simultaneously providing eco-friendly sustainable crops that can withstand numerous abiotic and biotic stresses. The current era requires high-throughput biotechnology approaches to alleviate the current plant production and protection crisis. Omics approaches are regarded as a collection of high throughput technologies ending with “omics” such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, phenomics and epigenomics. Furthermore, omics provide the best tactic to increase high quality crop production yield. A body of evidence has shown that microbial diversity, abundance, composition, functional gene patterns, and metabolic pathways at the genome level could also assist in understanding the contributions of the microbial community towards plant growth and protection. In addition, the link between plant genomes and phenotypes under physiological and environmental settings is highlighted by the integration of functional genomics with other omics. However, application of single omics technologies results in one disciplinary solution while raising multiple questions without answers. To address these challenges, we need to find new age solutions. For instance, omics technologies focusing on plant production and protection. Multi-layered information gathered from systems biology provides a comprehensive understanding of molecular regulator networks for improving plant growth and protection, which is supported by large-scale omics datasets. The conclusion drawn from the in-depth information is the holistic integration of multi-disciplinary omics approaches to pave the way towards eco-friendly, sustainable, agricultural productivity.