Plant Cell Wall Proteomics: An Assessment Twenty Years after Launching

Abstract

Cell walls are complex structures surrounding plant cells. They provide not only mechanical support and protection against environmental changes, but also a mean for cell-to-cell communication. They are mainly constituted of polysaccharides (about 90% of their mass) and proteins. Cell wall proteins (CWPs) play critical roles because they contribute to the plasticity of the cell wall architecture during development and in response to biotic and abiotic environmental changes. Their systematic identification has started in the 2000’s with the sequencing of the genome of the Arabidopsis thaliana model plant and the development of adapted mass spectrometry (MS) technologies. Since then, many other plants have been studied among which plants of agronomical interest. The description of cell wall proteomes has fully benefited not only from the improvement of MS technologies, but also from better sample preparation and peptide separation prior to MS analysis. Bioinformatics has also played critical roles by designing software allowing protein identification, annotation and quantification, as well creating MS data repositories.