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

https://doi.org/10.1074/mcp.M700314-MCP200Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

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.

Cited by (0)

Published, MCP Papers in Press, October 6, 2007, DOI 10.1074/mcp.M700314-MCP200

*

This research work was supported by grants from the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, India and the National Institute for Plant Genome Research (to N. C.) and by a predoctoral fellowship (to A. P.) from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

The on-line version of this article (available at http://www.mcponline.org) contains supplemental material.