A Proteomic View of Truffles: Aspects of Primary Metabolism and Molecular Processes During Their Life Cycle

Abstract

Proteins are responsible for an endless number of tasks within the cell. The whole set of proteins in a cell, the proteome, is highly dynamic and it changes from time to time in response to different environmental stimuli. The Tuber spp. proteomic assets have been widely studied for the past 20 years through various strategies, such as purification of proteins from biological sources and heterologous expression in prokaryotes and eukaryotic cells. Several proteins have been characterized in the different phases of the life cycle in the most important Tuber species in terms of agronomics and economics. In particular, the availability of study models led the researchers to study especially Tuber borchii, while the complete genome sequencing provided several information to study in depth Tuber melanosporum; on the contrary, Tuber magnatum is not cultivable in lab, so the studies were focused only on ascomata. Studies have focused also on the characterization of several metabolic pathways involved in the realization of its life cycle: in the vegetative life as it expands into the soil, during the formation of mycorrhizae and essential for the symbiosis instauration and during the development of the precious and edible carpophore. Herein we review some of the most interesting results that report the characterization of specific proteins and of metabolic pathways that are useful to develop a better understanding of Tuber life cycle

Tuberomics: a molecular profiling for the adaption of edible fungi (Tuber magnatum Pico) to different natural environments

“…Indeed, each of the three approaches adopted brought to highlight reproducible differences among the samples under investigation. Proteomic tecniques were widely used for determining environmentally-induced changes in protein composition [44,45]. Our proteomic pipeline retrieved spots that were conserved in every set of samples (i.e.…”

Physiological characteristics of pure cultures of a white-colored truffle <i>Tuber japonicum</i>

“…This is true for T. japonicum. Several enzymes are involved in the utilization and metabolism of C sources by Tuber species (Ceccaroli et al, 2011;Amicucci et al, 2016), and these activities vary among strains; one T. borchii strain, which grows well in mannitol, showed all enzyme activities of the mannitol cycle, but another strain, which grows poorly in mannitol, lacks mannitol phosphatase and exhibits low mannitol dehydrogenase activity (Ceccaroli et al, 2001). Among the C sources tested, all T. japonicum strains showed relatively good growth with glucose, dextrin, and starch, indicating that these are effective C sources for the growth of T. japonicum, along with T. melanosporum (Mamoun & Olivier, 1991) and T. maculatum Vittad.…”

“…japonicum . The utilization and assimilation of inorganic N in EM fungi, including Tuber species, are involved in several enzyme activities ( Smith & Read, 2008 ; Amicucci et al, 2016 ), and strain-specific variations of these activities have been reported in another EM fungus Hebeloma cylindrosporum ( Wagner, Gay, & Debaud, 1988 , 1989 ). Our results, therefore, imply that these activities of T .…”

“…japonicum . Several enzymes are involved in the utilization and metabolism of C sources by Tuber species ( Ceccaroli et al, 2011 ; Amicucci et al, 2016 ), and these activities vary among strains; one T . borchii strain, which grows well in mannitol, showed all enzyme activities of the mannitol cycle, but another strain, which grows poorly in mannitol, lacks mannitol phosphatase and exhibits low mannitol dehydrogenase activity ( Ceccaroli et al, 2001 ).…”