Razzaq Ali, Wishart David S, Wani Shabir Hussain, Hameed Muhammad Khalid, Mubin Muhammad, Saleem Fozia
Centre of Agricultural Biochemistry and Biotechnology (CABB), University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Faisalabad 38040, Pakistan.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada.
Metabolites. 2022 Jun 2;12(6):511. doi: 10.3390/metabo12060511.
Climate change continues to threaten global crop output by reducing annual productivity. As a result, global food security is now considered as one of the most important challenges facing humanity. To address this challenge, modern crop breeding approaches are required to create plants that can cope with increased abiotic/biotic stress. Metabolomics is rapidly gaining traction in plant breeding by predicting the metabolic marker for plant performance under a stressful environment and has emerged as a powerful tool for guiding crop improvement. The advent of more sensitive, automated, and high-throughput analytical tools combined with advanced bioinformatics and other omics techniques has laid the foundation to broadly characterize the genetic traits for crop improvement. Progress in metabolomics allows scientists to rapidly map specific metabolites to the genes that encode their metabolic pathways and offer plant scientists an excellent opportunity to fully explore and rationally harness the wealth of metabolites that plants biosynthesize. Here, we outline the current application of advanced metabolomics tools integrated with other OMICS techniques that can be used to: dissect the details of plant genotype-metabolite-phenotype interactions facilitating metabolomics-assisted plant breeding for probing the stress-responsive metabolic markers, explore the hidden metabolic networks associated with abiotic/biotic stress resistance, facilitate screening and selection of climate-smart crops at the metabolite level, and enable accurate risk-assessment and characterization of gene edited/transgenic plants to assist the regulatory process. The basic concept behind metabolic editing is to identify specific genes that govern the crucial metabolic pathways followed by the editing of one or more genes associated with those pathways. Thus, metabolomics provides a superb platform for not only rapid assessment and commercialization of future genome-edited crops, but also for accelerated metabolomics-assisted plant breeding. Furthermore, metabolomics can be a useful tool to expedite the crop research if integrated with speed breeding in future.
气候变化持续通过降低年生产力威胁全球作物产量。因此，全球粮食安全如今被视为人类面临的最重要挑战之一。为应对这一挑战，需要现代作物育种方法来培育能够应对日益增加的非生物/生物胁迫的植物。代谢组学通过预测植物在胁迫环境下的代谢标记物，在植物育种中迅速受到关注，并已成为指导作物改良的有力工具。更灵敏、自动化和高通量分析工具的出现，结合先进的生物信息学和其他组学技术，为广泛表征作物改良的遗传性状奠定了基础。代谢组学的进展使科学家能够迅速将特定代谢物与编码其代谢途径的基因进行关联，并为植物科学家提供了一个绝佳机会，以充分探索和合理利用植物生物合成的丰富代谢物。在此，我们概述了先进代谢组学工具与其他组学技术相结合的当前应用，这些应用可用于：剖析植物基因型 - 代谢物 - 表型相互作用的细节，促进代谢组学辅助植物育种以探测胁迫响应代谢标记物；探索与非生物/生物胁迫抗性相关的隐藏代谢网络；在代谢物水平促进气候智能型作物的筛选和选择；以及对基因编辑/转基因植物进行准确的风险评估和表征，以协助监管过程。代谢编辑背后的基本概念是识别控制关键代谢途径的特定基因，然后编辑与这些途径相关的一个或多个基因。因此，代谢组学不仅为未来基因组编辑作物的快速评估和商业化提供了一个绝佳平台，也为加速代谢组学辅助植物育种提供了平台。此外，如果未来与快速育种相结合，代谢组学可以成为加速作物研究的有用工具。
