Exploring the plant response to cadmium exposure by transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic approaches: Potentiality of high-throughput methods, promises of integrative biology

With the evolution of high-throughput techniques, performing organism-wide analyses of gene expression, protein content and metabolite profile is becoming easier. This new era of biology opens the way for incredibly promising advances but also extremely challenging difficulties in the aim of integrating these datasets into biologically relevant models. To address questions and unravel networks occurring in cadmium stressed plants, researchers have already taken advantage of such tools. We provide here an overview of the discoveries that have been made regarding plant−cadmium interaction using “omics” methods, and show how their use is relevant to compare species and stresses at the whole plant level. At the end, we propose future breakthroughs to be addressed using these techniques, and discuss the up-coming challenges of data mining and model drawing.