Contribution of Omics and Systems Biology to Plant Biotechnology

The development of modern genetic engineering approaches and high throughput technologies in biological research, besides the holistic view of systems biology, have triggered the progress of biotechnology to address plant productivity and stress adaptation. Indeed, plant biotechnology has the potential to overcome many problems we currently face that impair our agriculture, such as diseases and pests, environmental pressures, or climate change. The system biology field encompasses the identification of the general principles and patterns found in living systems, by studying the molecular diversity and integrate this knowledge in complex models of regulatory networks. The "omics," which comprises but not limited to genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, epigenomic, and metabolomic studies in entire plants, allow a better understanding of plant system biology and further contribute to biotechnology development. In this chapter, we provided an overview on omic studies for the searching and identification of metabolites and proteins employed by microorganisms to develop biotechnological products. Moreover, we present an overview of the central aspects of small RNA as regulators of gene expression connecting system networks and the potential application into plant biotechnology.