Recent Advances of Proteomics Technologies in Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Dear Colleagues,

The development and implementation of high-throughput analytical tools are giving researchers the opportunity to expand the available experimental approaches in order to gain a more realistic view of the molecular processes occurring in plants. Proteomics is one of these technological platforms in continuous development and with an enormous potential still to be fully exploited. With a presence of around two decades in plant research, proteomics has already illuminated many plant developmental stages, from seed germination to stress responses as well as a myriad of biochemical processes, from cell division to signal transduction.

Plant abiotic stress tolerance is a challenging field within plant physiology, seeking to understand the mechanisms by which plants are able to overcome the many environmental conditions that threaten their normal growth and development. Low or high temperatures, soil salinity, heavy metal contamination either in soils or in water, drought, ozone, pollution are just examples of conditions that impose what we call a stress in a plant. Plants in natural ecosystems are of course exposed to these threatens but the risk and danger is of a higher magnitude in crop plants, when abiotic stress may determine a substantial loss in productivity. Abiotic stress is a higly dynamic process in which gene batteries are affected in their expression leading to local and systemic molecular responses in plant cells. Proteins and enzymes are of course some of the main targets in these responses and the implementation of proteomic approaches is helping us to better understand cell responses.

The chance that proteomics may respond properly to each research question under examination mostly relies in the adequate advance of each step in the typical proteomic workflow: from protein extraction methods to those bioinformatic tools that enable us to extract all the information enclosed in a mass spectrometry-based analytical result.

The present Special Issue is focused to the application of proteomics to evaluate plant abiotic stress tolerance. The issue will be divided in two areas:

1. Advances in the proteomic workflow
2. Recent results in the proteomic of plant abiotic stress tolerance

Research and review articles devoted to the following topics are welcome: (i) recent advances in plant protein extraction procedures; (ii) improvements and advancements in mass spectrometry-based proteomics strategies; (iii) comparison between gel-free and gel-based proteomic approaches; (iv) advances in functional annotation and biological interpretation of proteomics data; (v) recent advances in mass spectrometry data processing and visualization; (vi) comparisons and use of general or specific bioinformatics databases for plant abiotic stress; (vii) proteomics of plant abiotic stress perception; (viii) proteomics in plant abiotic stress signal transduction; (viii) local or systemic proteomic responses to plant abiotic stress factors; (ix) any other feature of plant abiotic stress analysed under a proteomic perspective.

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• proteomics
• mass spectrometry-based proteomics
• proteomics workflow
• abiotic stress
• chilling
• flooding
• salinity
• heavy metal pollution