Plant Proteomics: Technologies and Applications

Abstract

Proteomics is generally defined as the simultaneous and high-throughput study of protein expression profiles in cells, tissues, organs and organisms. It is a relatively new scientific discipline which has developed highly significantly over the last decade and is now recognised as one of the most important tools used in the identification and characterisation of proteins or genes of interest. The researchers have turned to proteomics to study gene products and validate their predicted functions because the availability of the complete genome sequences of a variety of organisms itself is not sufficient to find out biological function. Proteomic data for an experiment includes quantitative expression profiles, profiles of posttranslational modifications (PTMs) and protein interaction networks and linking these towards the understanding of molecular mechanisms associated with endogenous and exogenous cues. The major application of proteomics technologies is to advance our knowledge in crop plant for their development, abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, PTMs and unravelling signal transduction cascades. Further, an in-depth comparative proteome study of subcellular organelles could provide more detailed information about the intrinsic mechanism of developmental or stress response. The success in proteomics research is attributed to advances in various technology platforms associated with MS-based techniques. The accurate quantitation of proteins and peptides in complex biological systems is one of the most challenging areas of proteomics. The discoveries aimed at improving sensitivity, and throughput of both mass analysers and fragmentation technology enabled mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics to become the mainstream method for the large-scale analysis of complex proteomes. Along with recent and ongoing improvements in liquid separation technologies and algorithms for protein/peptide identification, MS-based proteomics has become a powerful and valuable analytical tool to study highly complex and dynamic biological systems. In this chapter, we describe the recent progress in plant proteomics and highlight the achievements made in understanding the proteomes of major research area of plant biology.