Drought stress restricts plant growth and development by altering metabolic activity and biological functions. However, plants have evolved several cellular and molecular mechanisms to overcome drought stress. Drought tolerance is a multiplex trait involving the activation of signaling mechanisms and differentially expressed molecular responses. Broadly, drought tolerance comprises two steps: stress sensing/signaling and activation of various parallel stress responses (including physiological, molecular, and biochemical mechanisms) in plants. At the cellular level, drought induces oxidative stress by overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS), ultimately causing the cell membrane to rupture and stimulating various stress signaling pathways (ROS, mitogen-activated-protein-kinase, Ca²⁺, and hormone-mediated signaling). Drought-induced transcription factors activation and abscisic acid concentration co-ordinate the stress signaling and responses in cotton. The key responses against drought stress, are root development, stomatal closure, photosynthesis, hormone production, and ROS scavenging. The genetic basis, quantitative trait loci and genes of cotton drought tolerance are presented as examples of genetic resources in plants. Sustainable genetic improvements could be achieved through functional genomic approaches and genome modification techniques such as the CRISPR/Cas9 system aid the characterization of genes, sorted out from stress-related candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms, quantitative trait loci, and genes. Exploration of the genetic basis for superior candidate genes linked to stress physiology can be facilitated by integrated functional genomic approaches. We propose a third-generation sequencing approach coupled with genome-wide studies and functional genomic tools, including a comparative sequenced data (transcriptomics, proteomics, and epigenomic) analysis, which offer a platform to identify and characterize novel genes. This will provide information for better understanding the complex stress cellular biology of plants.

Biotic and abiotic stresses negatively affect the yield and overall plant developmental process, thus causing substantial losses in global sweet potato production. To cope with stresses, sweet potato has evolved numerous strategies to tackle ever-changing surroundings and biological and environmental conditions. The invention of modern sequencing technology and the latest data processing and analysis instruments has paved the way to integrate biological information from different approaches and helps to understand plant system biology more precisely. The advancement in omics technologies has accumulated and provided a great source of information at all levels (genome, transcript, protein, and metabolite) under stressful conditions. These latest molecular tools facilitate us to understand better the plant’s responses to stress signaling and help to process/integrate the biological information encoded within the biological system of plants. This review briefly addresses utilizing the latest omics strategies for deciphering the adaptive mechanisms for sweet potatoes’ biotic and abiotic stress tolerance via functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. This information also provides a powerful reference to understand the complex, well-coordinated stress signaling genetic regulatory networks and better comprehend the plant phenotypic responses at the cellular/molecular level under various environmental stimuli, thus accelerating the design of stress-resilient sweet potato via the latest genetic engineering approaches.