ABSTRACT
Industrialization is introducing various harmful chemicals into our environment and the plants being sessile have adopted different strategies to prevent the accumulation of these harmful chemicals within them or to detoxify them. This whole defense mechanism is being regulated at the genomic level where overexpression or silencing of certain genes leads to such responses that make the plant resistant to various stress conditions like heavy metal stress here. Genes, themselves are regulated by transcription factors and upon expression again give proteins which are either transcription factors to activate other genes or enzymes required in a metabolic or defense pathway. Thus, tracing the proteomic activity can help us understand how the pathways operate and enable us to make much better changes or inculcate the same proteomic activity in the plants that are metal stress sensitive. Omics tools have advanced to a great level because of the evolving technology from simple gel electrophoresis to much advanced gel-free based methods and novel spectroscopic techniques and all this is making our research more accurate and a number of cross-links are comprehended from the data of proteomics and are easily sorted by the biostatistical tools, hence making our study easier and quick. Heavy metal detection and their effects on the proteomes are being studied at molecular levels and the second generation proteomic tools are promising towards many new discoveries in proteomics.
