Proteome Analysis of Drought-Stressed Plants

Payam      Pour Mohammadi; Mohammad-Zaman      Nouri; Setsuko      Komatsu

Abstract

Among the environmental stresses, drought is the most severe stress in agriculture and improving yield under drought stress is a major goal for plant breeders. Drought or water deficit affects directly the cellular metabolism of plant leading to a significant reduction in growth index and ultimately crop yield. Several reports emphasized the existence of complex network in the cell in response to drought stress. Alterations in the expression of proteins play main role in the network and proteomics has the ability to discover the responsible proteins. The extent of information, that breeders have now, offers them new tools for breeding and the main strategy would be blending all knowledge on the traits sustaining yield under drought and accumulation of the most effective proteins or genes into elite genotypes without detrimental effects on yield potential. It ultimately will result in development of new cultivars with high yield potential and stability in dry environments. Although a number of reviews devoted to plant proteomics are available, review articles dedicated to plant cell proteins response under drought stress are very scanty. In the present review, an attempt has been made to summarize all significant contributions related to drought stresses and their impacts on cell, organelle and plasma membrane proteomes for better understanding of plants abiotic stress tolerance mechanism at protein level. This review provides new insights into the plants drought stress response mechanisms for future development of genetically engineered drought stress tolerant crop plants.

Keywords: Breeding, canola, drought, methodology, proteomics, plant, review, rice, soybean, sunflower, wheat