Metabolomic Approaches for Improving Crops Under Adverse Conditions

Crop productivity is affected by different abiotic stresses caused by complex environmental conditions including high and low light and temperature, drought, salinity, heavy metals, and hypoxia. Over the last decade, integrated data obtained using various "omics" approaches have provided a comprehensive picture of abiotic stress responses. Out of different omics approaches, metabolomics is treated as the final response of the organism because it determines changes in metabolite fluxes controlled by gene expression and/or the proteome. Studies suggest that under abiotic stress conditions, plants appear to reorganize their metabolic network in order to adapt to such conditions. During this reorganization, levels of a set of metabolites or specific metabolites are modulated to change the metabolic status of the cell to respond and/or adapt to the environmental conditions. These changes have been correlated with diversion of metabolite fluxes to certain pathways due to modulation of gene expression. Based on the progress made in our understanding of metabolic networks and their involvement in abiotic stress responses, improvements in crop stress tolerance have been attempted by means of gene(s) transfer. This chapter provides comprehensive details of metabolomics and biotechnological approaches to modulate metabolomic networks leading to abiotic stress tolerance.