A new COVID-19 variant, Omicron, has emerged from South Africa, indicating that the pandemic will not be over anytime soon. An unimaginable amount of economic damage has resulted from the pandemic. Omicron and its economic implications are discussed in detail in this review article. It also includes statistics on occurrence, mortality, and recuperation in Pakistan and data on the country’s immunization coverage. Developing countries with unstable economies, such as Pakistan, have experienced increased economic difficulties. As a result, all developed and underdeveloped countries should strictly adhere to preventive measures and improvements in diagnostic tests and vaccine development to bring the pandemic under control.

Cadmium (Cd) is a non-essential and toxic metal that accumulates in plant’s tissues and diminishes plant growth and productivity. In the present study, differential root transcriptomic analysis was carried out to identify Cd stress-responsive gene networks and functional annotation under Cd stress in wheat seedlings. For this purpose, the Yannong 0428 wheat cultivar was incubated with 40 µm/L of CdCl₂·2.5H₂O for 6 h at three different seedling growth days. After the quality screening, using the Illumina Hiseq 2000 platform, more than 2482 million clean reads were retrieved. Following this, 84.8% to 89.3% of the clean reads at three time points under normal conditions and 86.5% to 89.1% of the reads from the Cd stress condition were mapped onto the wheat reference genome. In contrast, at three separate seedling growth days, the data analysis revealed a total of 6221 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), including 1543 (24.8%) up-regulated genes and 4678 (75.8%) down-regulated genes. In total, 120 DEGs were co-expressed throughout all the growth days, whereas 1096, 1088, and 2265 DEGs were found to be selectively up-/down-regulated at 7d, 14d, and 30d, respectively. However, the clustering of DEGs, through utilizing the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), revealed that the DEGs in the metabolic category were frequently annotated for phenylpropanoid biosynthesis. In comparison, a considerable number of DEGs were linked to protein processing in the endoplasmic reticulum under the process of genetic information processing. Similarly, in categories in organismal systems and cellular processes, DEGs were found in plant hormone signal transduction pathways, and DEGs were identified in the plant–pathogen interaction pathway, respectively. However, DEGs in “endocytosis pathways” were enriched in environmental information processing. In addition, in-depth annotations of roughly specific heavy metal stress-response genes and pathways were also mined, and the expression patterns of eight DEGs were studied using quantitative real-time PCR. The results were congruent with the findings of RNA sequencing regarding transcript abundance in the studied wheat cultivar.