Getting Ready for Large-Scale Proteomics in Crop Plants

authored by

Sarah Brajkovic, Nils Rugen, Carlos Agius, Nicola Berner, Stephan Eckert, Amirhossein Sakhteman, Claus Schwechheimer, Bernhard Kuster

Abstract

Plants are an indispensable cornerstone of sustainable global food supply. While immense progress has been made in decoding the genomes of crops in recent decades, the composition of their proteomes, the entirety of all expressed proteins of a species, is virtually unknown. In contrast to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, proteomic analyses of crop plants have often been hindered by the presence of extreme concentrations of secondary metabolites such as pigments, phenolic compounds, lipids, carbohydrates or terpenes. As a consequence, crop proteomic experiments have, thus far, required individually optimized protein extraction protocols to obtain samples of acceptable quality for downstream analysis by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). In this article, we present a universal protein extraction protocol originally developed for gel-based experiments and combined it with an automated single-pot solid-phase-enhanced sample preparation (SP3) protocol on a liquid handling robot to prepare high-quality samples for proteomic analysis of crop plants. We also report an automated offline peptide separation protocol and optimized micro-LC-MS/MS conditions that enables the identification and quantification of ~10,000 proteins from plant tissue within 6 h of instrument time. We illustrate the utility of the workflow by analyzing the proteomes of mature tomato fruits to an unprecedented depth. The data demonstrate the robustness of the approach which we propose for use in upcoming large-scale projects that aim to map crop tissue proteomes.

Organisation(s)

Section Plant Molecular Biology and Plant Proteomics

External Organisation(s)

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Type

Article

Journal

Nutrients

Volume

15

ISSN

2072-6643

Publication date

03.02.2023

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Food Science, Nutrition and Dietetics

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15030783 (Access: Open)