Spatial and Multiple Omics Approaches for Pest and Disease Management: Opportunities and Challenges

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The management of plant pests and diseases presents a complex and dynamic challenge across molecular, cellular, organismal, and ecosystem levels. As global climate change continues to reshape traditional pest and pathogen dynamics, integrative, spatially informed strategies are urgently needed to safeguard crop productivity, food security, and the livelihoods of farmers and other agricultural value chain actors. Given the global need to enhance food production amid dwindling natural resources, the integration of omics technologies offers transformative potential. Recent advancements in spatial omics and multi-omics technologies offer powerful tools to unravel the intricate molecular and cellular responses that plants deploy against pests and diseases. These technologies facilitate the discovery of essential genes and genetic markers, along with pathways linked to resistance to stresses, thereby enhancing speed-resistance breeding programs and precise genetic improvements. This chapter explores cutting-edge developments in spatial and multiple omics approaches for understanding and management of plant interactions with pests, pathogens, and plants. It emphasizes the integration of multi-omics strategies such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, to map plant immune responses to optimize pest management strategies and predict future outbreaks. Advances in synthetic biology, genome editing, and artificial intelligence are also explored, highlighting their roles in designing crops with enhanced resistance traits. Furthermore, the chapter discusses critical challenges and future opportunities for translating multi-omics insights into sustainable and resilient agricultural practices. By enabling comprehensive profiling of stress-specific cellular responses and revealing the molecular underpinnings of plant growth and development, these approaches provide new avenues for improving crop performance under pest and disease attack. Leveraging these innovations will be key to developing more efficient, environmentally friendly agricultural pest- and disease-management strategies.