Comparative protein profiles of Butea superba tubers under seasonal changes

Abstract

Seasonal changes are major factors affecting environmental conditions which induce multiple stresses in plants, leading to changes in protein relative abundance in the complex cellular plant metabolic pathways. Proteomics was applied to study variations in proteome composition of Butea. superba tubers during winter, summer and rainy season throughout the year using two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis coupled with a nanoflow liquid chromatography coupled to electrospray ionization quadrupole-time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry. A total of 191 protein spots were identified and also classified into 12 functional groups. The majority of these were mainly involved in carbohydrate and energy metabolism (30.37 %) and defense and stress (18.32 %). The results exhibited the highest numbers of identified proteins in winter-harvested samples. Forty-five differential proteins were found in different seasons, involving important metabolic pathways. Further analysis indicated that changes in the protein levels were due mainly to temperature stress during summer and to water stress during winter, which affected cellular structure, photosynthesis, signal transduction and homeostasis, amino-acid biosynthesis, protein destination and storage, protein biosynthesis and stimulated defense and stress mechanisms involving glycolytic enzymes and relative oxygen species catabolizing enzymes. The proteins with differential relative abundances might induce an altered physiological status within plant tubers for survival. The work provided new insights into the better understanding of the molecular basis of plant proteomes and stress tolerance mechanisms, especially during seasonal changes. The finding suggested proteins that might potentially be used as protein markers in differing seasons in other plants and aid in selecting B. superba tubers with the most suitable medicinal properties in the future.

Two liverworts from same habitats developed many similar but few distinct seasonal adaptive strategies: Insights from a transcriptomic approach

“…Consequently, plants developed several tolerance mechanisms to combat environmental pressures imposed by seasonality. To gain insight into these adaptive mechanisms, several research at the ecological, morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels have been conducted in a wide variety of plants (Singh and Yadava, 1974;Chen et al, 2006;Shao et al, 2008;Vuleta et al, 2010;Angelcheva et al, 2014;Leelahawong et al, 2016;Sheikh et al, 2017;Aoussar et al, 2020). The molecular aspects of seasonality have been deeply investigated through the use of some "omics" technologies such as transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics (Angelcheva et al, 2014;Budzinski et al, 2016;Jokipii-Lukkari et al, 2018;Nagano et al, 2019;Lu et al, 2020;Bag et al, 2020;Grebe et al, 2020;Sobreiro et al, 2021).…”