Muzamil Ahmad Rather

Only a percentage of the fungal kingdom's species has been recognized and documented, resulting in a tremendous diversity of organisms. It has at least an order of magnitude more variety than the total number of species reported. Mushrooms have been used as medicine for millennia, having a variety of bioactive chemicals that include antibacterial, cytotoxic, and anticancer properties. In mushrooms, bioactive molecules can be found as polysaccharides or secondary metabolites such as phenolic compounds, terpenes, and steroids in the cell wall. Tremella fuciformis is a tremellaceae-family basidiomycotan fungus. Because of its inability to break down cellulose and lignin, it feeds on them in a parasitic manner. Since the beginning of time, it has been employed in traditional Chinese medicine and food. In this chapter, the taxonomy, resources, availability, phytochemistry, and pharmacological potential of the mushroom are summarized. In addition, the mycology, metabolism, and economic importance of the mushroom is briefly outlined.

To explore changes in proteins and metabolites under stress circumstances, genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics methods are used. In-depth research over the previous ten years has gradually revealed the fundamental processes of plants’ responses to environmental stress. Abiotic stresses, which include temperature extremes, water scarcity, and metal toxicity brought on by human activity and urbanization, are a major cause for concern, since they can result in unsustainable warming trends and drastically lower crop yields. Furthermore, there is an emerging reliance on agrochemicals. Stress is responsible for physiological transformations such as the formation of reactive oxygen, stomatal opening and closure, cytosolic calcium ion concentrations, metabolite profiles and their dynamic changes, expression of stress-responsive genes, activation of potassium channels, etc. Research regarding abiotic stresses is lacking because defense feedbacks to abiotic factors necessitate regulating the changes that activate multiple genes and pathways that are not properly explored. It is clear from the involvement of these genes that plant stress response and adaptation are complicated processes. Targeting the multigenicity of plant abiotic stress responses caused by genomic sequences, transcripts, protein organization and interactions, stress-specific and cellular transcriptome collections, and mutant screens can be the first step in an integrative approach. Therefore, in this review, we focused on the genomes, proteomics, and metabolomics of tomatoes under abiotic stress.

A simple yet effective, handheld and flexible bright-field and fluorescence microscopic platform on a smartphone with varying optical magnifications is reported for morphological analysis and onboard cell counting features.