Bringing New Methods to the Seed Proteomics Platform: Challenges and Perspectives.

Galina Smolikova,Alexander Tsarev,Igor Tikhonovich,Gregory Mavropolo-Stolyarenko,Andrej Frolov,Elena Lukasheva,Tatiana Bilova,Vladimir Zhukov,Ekaterina Romanovskaya,Wolfgang Hoehenwarter,Ekaterina Podolskaya,Alena Soboleva,Sergei Medvedev,Daria Gorbach

doi:10.3390/ijms21239162

Abstract

For centuries, crop plants have represented the basis of the daily human diet. Among them, cereals and legumes, accumulating oils, proteins, and carbohydrates in their seeds, distinctly dominate modern agriculture, thus play an essential role in food industry and fuel production. Therefore, seeds of crop plants are intensively studied by food chemists, biologists, biochemists, and nutritional physiologists. Accordingly, seed development and germination as well as age- and stress-related alterations in seed vigor, longevity, nutritional value, and safety can be addressed by a broad panel of analytical, biochemical, and physiological methods. Currently, functional genomics is one of the most powerful tools, giving direct access to characteristic metabolic changes accompanying plant development, senescence, and response to biotic or abiotic stress. Among individual post-genomic methodological platforms, proteomics represents one of the most effective ones, giving access to cellular metabolism at the level of proteins. During the recent decades, multiple methodological advances were introduced in different branches of life science, although only some of them were established in seed proteomics so far. Therefore, here we discuss main methodological approaches already employed in seed proteomics, as well as those still waiting for implementation in this field of plant research, with a special emphasis on sample preparation, data acquisition, processing, and post-processing. Thereby, the overall goal of this review is to bring new methodologies emerging in different areas of proteomics research (clinical, food, ecological, microbial, and plant proteomics) to the broad society of seed biologists.

Highlights

Seeds represent the basis of the human diet and contribute daily to consumed foods [1]
The depth of its characterization needs to be increased for a better understanding of the processes accompanying seed development and germination
Simultaneous consideration of the datasets acquired by liquid chromatography (LC)-mass spectrometric (MS) and 2D-GE is necessary

Summary

Introduction

Seeds represent the basis of the human diet and contribute daily to consumed foods [1]. The rapidly growing human population requires a secure, continuous supply with foods of appropriate quality and safety [2]. Modern agriculture aims at sustainable production of high-quality seeds. Due to the ongoing climate changes, it can be a challenging task [3]. The improvement of crop plant productivity is desired [4,5]. The yields of crop biomass and tolerance to environmental stress need to be increased simultaneously. Understanding of the fundamental processes accompanying seed development, storage, and germination, is required

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion