Proteomics for Understanding the Interaction Between Plant and Rhizospheric Microflora

Abstract

Rhizosphere is a complex system of biological activities of plants and microflora. Interaction between plants and microbes residing in its rhizosphere has been point of interest among the scientific communities for a long time. In-depth knowledge of these interactions is crucial to the current world scenario in context of food availability. Metagenomics and metatranscriptomic studies are being done with the objective elucidate the diversity of culturable and nonculturable microbiome. But this information is incomplete without understanding their functional role in plant–microbiome interaction. Complete proteome represents the ongoing metabolic processes happening in soil at particular time and needs to be studied for knowing the key players in functionality of microbiome. Metaproteomics is emerging tool that sketch the information about entire proteins present in a specific environmental situation at a particular time. It correlates the diversity and functionality of soil microorganisms in both dominant species and at community level. With the help of traditional tools, the development of high-throughput proteomics tools like mass spectrometry, the better understanding of functional aspects of soil complex system has become feasible. However, the progress is little bit slow due to the presence of some bottle neck like presence of various interfering molecules present in the soil samples, scarcity of soil proteome databases, etc. This chapter discusses proteomics tools that are available and review recent studies where the proteomics tools have been applied to decode the underlying processes responsible for differential functioning of soil microbiome in diverse environments.