The Importance of Multi-Omics Studies for Stress Tolerance and Plant Growth in Sustainable Agriculture

One of the most important transformative strategies for better understanding of plant resilient against abiotic and biotic stresses are the integration of omics approaches, encompassing genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and phenomics. Genomics explores genome structure, evolution, and function, and advances in next-generation genome annotation and sequencing have enabled the accurate and complete decoding of different plant genomes. Epigenetics involves heritable gene expression alterations without DNA sequence changes, mainly through histone modification, and DNA methylation. Among the main epigenetic mechanisms, DNA methylation is particularly important in plants and is maintained throughout mitosis. Transcriptomics is a study of all RNA molecules transcribed in a cell or organism, providing useful information about dynamic patterns of gene expression. Recent advances in sequencing technology have enabled more evolutionary and accurate transcriptomic analysis. Metabolomics is a powerful approach because metabolites and their concentrations Metabolomics is known to provide a direct functional readout of the physiological state of an organism. It can deal with qualitative and quantitative assessment of metabolites, which are necessary intermediates and end products of metabolism. Metabolomics uses targeted approaches such as quantitative and hypothesis-driven as well as non-targeted approaches to characterize plant metabolites. This article aims to study the importance of multi-omics studies for crop abiotic and biotic stress tolerance while considering plant growth in sustainable agriculture. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the metabolic, epigenetic, and genetic bases of main agronomic traits in crops, considering the integration of multi-omics data is necessary. The integration of different technologies can induce better optimized farming activities, sustainable agriculture, and crop improvement.