Integration of transcriptomic and proteomic analysis towards understanding the systems biology of root hairs

Abstract

Plants and other multicellular organisms consist of many types of specialized cells. Systems-wide exploration of large-scale information from singe cell level is essential to understand how cell works. Root hairs, tubular-shaped outgrowths from root epidermal cells, play important roles in the acquisition of nutrients and water, in the interaction with microbe, and in plant anchorage, and represent an ideal model to study the biology of a single cell type. Single cell sampling combined with omics approaches has been applied to study plant root hairs. This review emphasizes the integration of omics approaches towards understanding the systems biology of root hairs, unraveling the common and plant species-specific properties of root hairs, as well as the concordance of protein and transcript abundance. Understanding plant root hair biology by mining the integrated omics data will provide a way to know how a single cell differentiates, elongates, and functions, which might help molecularly modify crops for developing sustainable agriculture practices.

Keywords: Plant proteomics; Root hairs; Transcriptomics.