Current status and future prospects of omics tools in climate change research

Omics referring to a group of biological tools has greatly influenced today’s world of modern research. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics together they help to bring out the best of characters in plants and other organisms for its improvement and enhancement of important bioactive compounds. Genomic study for finding chromosome location, phenotypic analysis by QTL mapping, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), etc. are being practiced along with the development of genome editing by CRISPERCas9 for a variety of crop plants under stress conditions from the past few years. Studies made on yeast and Arabidopsis, transcriptome profiling, and microarray-based studies could detect the significant alteration of gene expression and some rare novel transcript to map out the physiological pathways. Mass spectroscopybased approaches like NMR, MALDI, and GC-MS came into being to simplify protein and metabolite studies, its structure, and its function which reciprocate in many important biological signalling cascades. Physiological and morphological changes in an organism due to environmental stress are an ongoing issue and newest addition to the research field, and with time, changes in the entire genome are a matter to look into where only molecular approaches can answer it. Thus, in this chapter we tried to summarize various aspects of omics tools and its future scope which can be utilize in climate change research.