ABSTRACT
Approaches for Reconstruction, Modeling, and Analysis of -Omes ........................ 170 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... 171 References ...................................................................................................................................... 171
8.1 CLIMATE CHANGE, BIODIVERSITY, AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION
Sustainable agriculture has run its course during decades gone by, and “food security” issues are not what they used to be in the past. Due to the ever-changing global climate and population growth, food security is now one of the hottest topics of discussion around the world. To overcome food shortages, hunger, and starvation, a breakthrough in cutting-edge research and translation of the research findings to the field are desperately needed. Technologies including high-yielding varieties, intensive use of agrochemicals, and so on, used in the green revolution, helped to feed billions of people. However, they have caused significant environmental degradation and seem unable to meet the future demand for food security. The impacts of global climate and environmental change mean that crops are prone to damage on an unprecedented scale. Therefore, there is an increased demand for research efforts and scientific collaboration to address the need for enhanced food production by minimizing the impacts of climate change in crop production. In this chapter, we not only discuss the past and future of sustainable agriculture but also try to bring to the forefront the necessity of expediting research using high-throughput omics technologies such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Among these, proteomics is the main focus of this review, in which we describe its use in crops, giving examples from cereals to legumes and fruits. We also give an insight into potential biomarkers and their exploitation in screening natural genetic resources, alone or in combination with other technology-derived results, for generating the next-generation crop plants for the twenty-first century and beyond.
