A review on applications of plant network biology to understand the drought stress response in economically important cereal crops

Cereals have evolved various tolerance mechanisms to cope with the drought environment. Understanding the drought tolerance mechanism of cereal crops at the molecular level offers a trail to produce high yielding and drought tolerant cultivars to sustain food and nutritional security. Systems biology approaches have been recognized as the vital player to generate insights on the genome wide stress-regulation mechanisms. The integration of stress manipulating factors such as the transcription factors, co-expressed genes and metabolic flux, etc., highlights the self-driven drought-responsive mechanism. Hence, reviewing the regulatory mechanisms involved in alleviating drought stressed plants is crucial, especially in economically and nutritionally important cereals. Therefore, various in-silico tools and databases available for predicting genes and proteins involved in the drought-responsive mechanism have been outlined and described with the scope to develop an advanced level of understanding of the drought stress responses in cereals. Thus, the details provided in the review would enable the reader to differentiate the competencies of algorithms employed and give scope to choose the appropriate tool and technique to decline the negative impacts and limit the failures in the intensive crop improvement research.