Proteomics Approach to Identify Dehydration Responsive Nuclear Proteins from Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Abstract

Dehydration or water-deficit is one of the most important environmental stress factors that greatly influences plant growth and development and limits crop productivity. Plants respond and adapt to such stress by altering their cellular metabolism and activating various defense machineries. Mechanisms that operate signal perception, transduction, and downstream regulatory events provide valuable information about the underlying pathways involved in environmental stress responses. The nuclear proteins constitute a highly organized, complex network that plays diverse roles during cellular development and other physiological processes. To gain a better understanding of dehydration response in plants, we have developed a comparative nuclear proteome in a food legume, chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). Three-week-old chickpea seedlings were subjected to progressive dehydration by withdrawing water and the changes in the nuclear proteome were examined using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Approximately 205 protein spots were found to be differentially regulated under dehydration. Mass spectrometry analysis allowed the identification of 147 differentially expressed proteins, presumably involved in a variety of functions including gene transcription and replication, molecular chaperones, cell signaling, and chromatin remodeling. The dehydration responsive nuclear proteome of chickpea revealed a coordinated response, which involves both the regulatory as well as the functional proteins. This study, for the first time, provides an insight into the complex metabolic network operating in the nucleus during dehydration. Molecular & Cellular Proteomics 7:88 -107, 2008.Environmental stress limits growth, development, and crop productivity (1, 2) and plays a major role in determining the geographic distribution of plant species. Several environmental stresses are united by the fact that at least part of their detrimental effect on plant performance is caused by disruption of plant water status. Periods of little or no rainfall can lead to a meteorological condition called drought. However, water deficit or dehydration, can also occur at conditions in which water is not limiting, through altered ion content and water uptake caused by high salinity or by formation of extracellular ice during freezing. Desiccation is the extreme form of dehydration wherein most of the protoplasmic "free" water is lost and the cell survival relies on the 'bound' water associated with the cell matrix.

A systems biology perspective on the role of WRKY transcription factors in drought responses in plants

“…This is a clear indication of the dehydration-induced increase in concentration of a wRKY TF in the nucleus and suggests that this wRKY is regulated by water stress (Choudhary et al 2009). excitingly, a similar study of the dehydration-responsive nuclear proteome of chickpea (Pandey et al 2008) from the same group also identified a similar wRKY protein that is upregulated by dehydration in chickpea. The chickpea wRKY protein appears to be an ortholog of the Arabidopsis group I protein, AtwRKY4.…”

The Grapevine Expression Atlas Reveals a Deep Transcriptome Shift Driving the Entire Plant into a Maturation Program

“…We also identified a transcription factor homologous to Arabidopsis MYB24, which plays a role in anther development (Matus et al, 2008). Topic 2 (leaves undergoing senescence) was characterized by the strong expression of stress response genes, including those encoding several ribosomal proteins and histones that may control stress-induced gene expression and protein synthesis (Pandey et al, 2008;Falcone Ferreyra et al, 2010), abiotic stress response enzymes, such as stilbene synthase, glutathione S-transferase (oxidative stress), and EARLY LIGHT-INDUCED PROTEIN1 (illumination stress), and pathogen response factors, including metallothionein (Breeze et al, 2011), PATHOGENESIS-RELATED10-like proteins, and two ADP-ribosylation factors (Nomura et al, 2011). Samples from mature/woody samples were distributed over three topics: ripening berries (topic 3), withering berries (topic 5), and veraison and mid-ripening seeds, winter buds, and woody stems (organs related to woody structures or to the dormant state; topic 4).…”

Gene Discovery and Tissue-Specific Transcriptome Analysis in Chickpea with Massively Parallel Pyrosequencing and Web Resource Development

“…In addition, a few EST projects have provided a few thousand singlepass sequences (Buhariwalla et al, 2005;Gao et al, 2008;Ashraf et al, 2009;Varshney et al, 2009;Jain and Chattopadhyay, 2010). Although several genes/ESTs involved in various stress responses have been identified based on transcriptomic and proteomic studies (Pandey et al, 2006(Pandey et al, , 2008Mantri et al, 2007;Molina et al, 2008Molina et al, , 2011Varshney et al, 2009), the gene discovery has been very limited in chickpea. So far, only a few candidate genes have been cloned and functionally validated (Kaur et al, 2008;Shukla et al, 2009;Tripathi et al, 2009;Peng et al, 2010).…”