Introduction: Advances in Plant Omics and Systems Biology

Abstract

How the complexity of biological systems can be understood is currently limited by the amount of biological information we have available to be incorporate in the vastitude of possibilities that could represent how a biological organism function. This point of view is, of course, alive under the paradigm that describes a living thing as a whole that could never be interpreted as to the sole understanding of its separated parts.

If we are going to achieve the knowledge to understand all the complex relations between the molecules, pathways, organelles, cells, organs, phenotypes, and environments is unknown. However, that is exactly what moves us toward digging the most profound nature of relationships present in the living organisms.

During the last 20 years, a big workforce was dedicated to the development of techniques, instruments, and scientific approaches that guided a whole new generation of scientists into the universe of omics approaches. The implementation of technological advances in several omics applications, such as transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, has brought to light the information that nowadays reshape our previous thinking on specific aspects of plant sciences, including growth, development, organ communication, chromatin states, and metabolism, not to mention the underpinning role of regulatory mechanisms that in many cases are essentially the basis for the phenotypical expression of a biological phenomenon and plants adaptation to their environment.

In this chapter, some of the original concepts of complex systems theory were briefly discussed, and examples of omics approaches that are contributing to uncovering emergent characteristics of plants are presented and discussed. The combination of several experimental and computational or mathematical approaches indicated that there is room for improvements and novel discoveries. However, the level of complexity of biological systems seems to require and demand us to unify efforts toward the integration of the large omics datasets already available and the ones to come. This unification may represent the necessary breakthrough to the achievement of the understanding of complex phenomena. To do so, the inclusion of systems biology thinking into the training of undergraduate and graduate students of plant sciences and related areas seems to be also a contribution that is necessary to be organized and implemented in a worldwide scale.