Plant proteomics and environmental pollution

Among the various abiotic challenges to plant growth, environmental pollution is the one toward which there is an urgent need of concern, this environmental pollution not only affects human life and alters his lifestyle and physiology but also, these detrimental phenomena that negatively affect the plant’s growth and development thereby influencing the crop production. For various environmental pollutions like atmospheric toxic gasses and heavy metals in soil, there will be an inbuilt adaptation with particular response mechanisms within the plant system. In view to understand those stress-specific response mechanisms, this chapter takes an outlook toward the contribution of proteomic studies for various pollutants by means of modification of proteins that are prior produced or production of a new set of proteins that may be helpful to plant to fight against several abiotic stress and also gives an overview of the conventional to advanced proteomics techniques that has their application in different proteomic studies of different agricultural crop plants and also highlights the specific modifications that take place in the target cell during the stress condition, so that these proteomic based knowledge gained can be used as a marker for indicating the intensity of pollution of a specific pollutant and also serves in the decision making during the crop management for a further increment of biological yield.