Metabolomic Insights into Salt Adaptation in Halophytes
摘要
Salinity is a major abiotic stress that drastically affects overall crop production. Most of the crop plants are sensitive to salinity, and in contrast, halophytes are plants resistant to even higher salt concentrations and can grow under high salinity, and throughout their evolution, holophilic plants have adapted various strategies to endure under such extreme environments. The mechanism of salt stress adaptation in halophytes is very complex and includes effective coordination among different physiological processes, metabolite pathways, and protein and gene networks. Therefore, elucidating the salt adaptation strategies in halophytes at gene, protein, ionic, and metabolite levels can be useful for developing strategies to improve salt stress tolerance in crop plants. In halophytes, diverse metabolites including amino acids, sugars, polyols, fatty acids, organic acids, secondary metabolites, and phytohormones are differentially accumulated to adapt under salt stress. Among them, proline, glycine betaine, gamma-aminobutyric acid, sucrose, glucose, xylose, mannitol, pinitol, myo-inositol, palmitic acid, stearic acid, and different phenylpropanoids are the important metabolites that are altered under salt stress in halophytes. The present chapter discusses salt adaptation strategies of halophytes at the metabolomics level through the metabolite profiling in response to salt stress. Gaining insight into the mechanisms of halophytic adaptation may offer avenues to develop strategies for bio-saline agriculture.