Abstract
Plant growth throughout the world is often limited by unfavourable environmental conditions. This paper reports results of a study on long- and short-term osmotic stress (−0.5 MPa) followed by a recovery on in vitro translational capacity of polysomes and on the composition of polysome-associated proteins in germinating pea (<em>Pisum sativum </em>L.) seeds. Here we show that, under osmotic stress, cytoskeleton-bound polysomes were charaterized by the highest translation activity, which may be indicative of an important role that this population of polysomes plays in the synthesis of the so-called “stress proteins”. We also find out that in response to osmotic stress, new proteins (22.01, 96.47 and 105.3 kDa), absent in the unstressed sample, associated with the total pool of polysomes, whereas the protein of 22.95 kDa, which was present in the embryonic tissue of seeds germinating under unstressed conditions, disappeared. These changes may have affected both the stability and the translational capacity of polysomes.
Highlights
Changes in the environment, such as drought, salinity, high or low temperature, are an important factor which affects the growth of crops and the volume of crop yields [1,2,3]
SDS-PAGE showed that small-molecule proteins – less than 40 kDa (Fig. 1) – dominated among the ribosomal proteins bound with the total population of polysomes as well as with their particular fractions, such as free polysomes (FP), membrane-bound polysomes (MBP), cytoskeleton-bound polysomes (CBP) and cytoskeleton-membrane-bound polysomes (CMBP)
It is noteworthy that these proteins (22.0 and 105.3 kDa) bound to all fractions of polysomes (FP, MBP, CBP and CMBP) isolated from seeds germinated under stress conditions
Summary
Changes in the environment, such as drought, salinity, high or low temperature, are an important factor which affects the growth of crops and the volume of crop yields [1,2,3]. Very important legume grown and consumed extensively worldwide is pea [4]. As a rich source of proteins, carbohydrates, fibre, vitamins and minerals, peas are important in human nutrition [5]. The earliest metabolic change caused by water stress is a decreased amount of polysomes [7]. Once the polysomes have been disaggregated, the plant growth is inhibited due to a slower protein synthesis rate [7,8,9]. Considerable reduction in the amount of polysomes in plant tissues is observable after osmotic stress lasting for just 20–30 minutes [10]. Decrease of the content of polysomes in response to abiotic stresses is connected with the process of “switching” the expression of genes from those participating in the growth and development
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