Relevance of proteomic investigations in plant abiotic stress physiology

Abstract

Plant growth and productivity are influenced by various abiotic stresses. Stressful conditions may lead to delays in seed germination, reduced seedling growth, and decreased crop yields. Plants respond to environmental stresses via differential expression of a subset of genes, which results in changes in omic compositions, such as transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome. Since the development of modern biotechnology, various research projects have been carried out to understand the approaches that plants have adopted to overcome environmental stresses. Advancements in omics have made functional genomics easy to understand. Since the fundamentals of classical genomics were unable to clear up confusion related to the functional aspects of the metabolic processes taking place during stress conditions, new fields have been designed and are known as omics. Proteomics, the analysis of genomic complements of proteins, has caused a flurry of activity in the past few years. It defines protein functions in cells and explains how those protein functions respond to changing environmental conditions. The ability of crop plants to cope up with the variety of environmental stresses depends on a number of changes in their proteins, which may be up- and downregulated as a result of altered gene expression. Most of these molecules display an essential function, either in the regulation of the response (e.g., components of the signal transduction pathway), or in the adaptation process (e.g., enzymes involved in stress repair and degradation of damaged cellular contents), allowing plants to recover and survive the stress. Many of these proteins are constitutively expressed under normal conditions, but when under stress, they undergo a modification of their expression levels. This review will explain how proteomics can help in elucidating important plant processes in response to various abiotic stresses.