Multi-Omics Approaches to Improve Rice Quality Characteristics under Abiotic and Biotic Environmental Stresses

Abstract

: Rice, the most widely consumed grain by billions of people worldwide, has become the first crop to have a complete genome sequence and serves as a model crop for monocots. Advancements in multi-omics methodologies have provided a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying stress tolerance in rice and have accelerated the development of rice varieties with improved grain quality under both abiotic and biotic stresses. Recently, high-throughput multi-omics technologies have identified numerous key genes, proteins, and metabolites linked to stress-tolerance mechanisms. This review summarizes recent studies across multi-omics disciplines, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and epigenomics, and their applications in improving rice quality traits under abiotic and biotic stresses. These challenging environments include extreme temperatures, drought, salinity, submergence, infection with rice stripe virus, bacterial blight, and blast. The article also discusses combining multi-omics data to identify key genes, molecular pathways, and gene regulatory networks responsible for abiotic and biotic stress responses and resistance mechanisms, especially as they relate to rice quality traits. It describes the potential of multi-omics-assisted breeding methodologies for developing environmental stress-tolerant rice varieties with improved quality traits. It also elucidates the limitations, challenges, and future perspectives of adopting multi-omics methodologies to improve rice quality traits under various environmental stress conditions.