Single cell gene regulatory networks in plants: Opportunities for enhancing climate change stress resilience

Global warming poses major challenges for plant survival and agricultural productivity. Thus, efforts to enhance stress resilience in plants are key strategies for protecting food security. Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are a critical mechanism conferring stress resilience. Until recently, predicting GRNs of the individual cells that make up plants and other multicellular organisms was impeded by aggregate population scale measurements of transcriptome and other genome-scale features. With the advancement of high-throughput single cell RNA-seq and other single cell assays, learning GRNs for individual cells is now possible, in principle. In this article, we report on recent advances in experimental and analytical methodologies for single cell sequencing assays especially as they have been applied to the study of plants. We highlight recent advances and ongoing challenges for scGRN prediction, and finally, we highlight the opportunity to use scGRN discovery for studying and ultimately enhancing abiotic stress resilience in plants.