Omics studies for vegetable improvement

In human food chain, vegetables are protective supplementary foods owing to their richness in nutraceutical supplements including carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, amino acids, dietary fiber, and many of the secondary metabolites (phenolics, flavonoids, small bioactive peptides, glucosinolates), which protectively help in improving immunity and keeping humans in good physical and mental health. Owing to the multifarious importance of vegetables as potentially dominant crops in the agri-food and nutrition chain, research and developmental efforts were taken since long to potentiate the crops not only at the scale of farm management, seed quality, crop protection practices, overall production, processing, and post-harvest management but also against the threats and challenges due to harsh and ever-changing climate and concurrently emerging pests and diseases in the field. With the advancement in the omics technologies, which pertains to fetch the information from genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome of the vegetable plants and link them with the phenome of the crops to understand the physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms at the level of gene expression, regulation, translation, and metabolic pathway, the generation and interpretation of the omics data have taken a long way to modulate vegetable crops. This chapter entails with the development in the techniques of the science of omics and their role in explaining biological processes pertaining to plant growth, development, disease/pest resistance, and tolerance to abiotic stresses. We have also described a number of crop-wise applications of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics and explained with few examples, trends in phenomics in the vegetable crops.