A comprehensive overview of omics-based approaches to enhance biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in sweet potato

Abstract

Biotic and abiotic stresses negatively affect the yield and overall plant developmental process, thus causing substantial losses in global sweet potato production. To cope with stresses, sweet potato has evolved numerous strategies to tackle ever-changing surroundings and biological and environmental conditions. The invention of modern sequencing technology and the latest data processing and analysis instruments has paved the way to integrate biological information from different approaches and helps to understand plant system biology more precisely. The advancement in omics technologies has accumulated and provided a great source of information at all levels (genome, transcript, protein, and metabolite) under stressful conditions. These latest molecular tools facilitate us to understand better the plant’s responses to stress signaling and help to process/integrate the biological information encoded within the biological system of plants. This review briefly addresses utilizing the latest omics strategies for deciphering the adaptive mechanisms for sweet potatoes’ biotic and abiotic stress tolerance via functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. This information also provides a powerful reference to understand the complex, well-coordinated stress signaling genetic regulatory networks and better comprehend the plant phenotypic responses at the cellular/molecular level under various environmental stimuli, thus accelerating the design of stress-resilient sweet potato via the latest genetic engineering approaches.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (32350410410, 32250410283, 32250410314, 31800386, 32000201), Jiangsu Province Excellent Postdoctoral Program (2022ZB676, 2022ZB677, 2022ZB678, 2022ZB666, 2023ZB863), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20211319), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023 M731387 and 2023 M731386). Finally, we want to acknowledge BioRender, as all the figures were created on this platform.

Author contributions

S.A. and J.C. conceived the idea, wrote and edited the manuscript. S.A. and P.T. designed the figures and tables. M.S.S.K., S.X., F.I., A.U.I., M.A., S.L., and P.T. reviewed and edited the manuscript. All the authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article, as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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