ABSTRACT
Salinity stress is one of the major threats to plant performance which leads to the significant loss of the crop production worldwide. Being polygenic in nature, salinity stress induced changes are complex to understand. On exposure to salinity stress, plants undergo various molecular, physiological, and biochemical changes to combat the stress response. In general, salinity stress affects ion transport, synthesis of reactive oxygen species (ROS), solute accumulation and leads to the hormonal changes as well. These changes altogether have toxic and inhibitory effect on cell metabolism, photosynthetic apparatus, membrane structure, cell division, and growth. During the past two decades, various “omics” approaches have been used for the comprehensive understanding of the salinity stress signaling and tolerance mechanism in plants. The system biology approach using transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics have discovered that the salinity overly sensitive (SOS) signaling is an early key pathway which helps to maintain ion homeostasis in plants during salinity stress. Large numbers of salinity-responsive genes and transcription factors have been identified and characterized using transcriptomic, genomic approaches and confirmed by proteomics analysis. This chapter highlights the recent advances made to understand salinity stress using various “omics” tools.
