Abstract
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are proteins that lack secondary and/or tertiary structure under physiological conditions. These proteins are very abundant in eukaryotic proteomes and play crucial roles in all molecular mechanisms underlying the response to environmental challenges. In plants, different IDPs involved in stress response have been identified and characterized. Nevertheless, a comprehensive evaluation of protein disorder in plant proteomes under abiotic or biotic stresses is not available so far. In the present work the transcriptome dataset of strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) fruits interacting with the fungal pathogen Colletotrichum acutatum was actualized onto the woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca) genome. The obtained cDNA sequences were translated into protein sequences, which were subsequently subjected to disorder analysis. The results, providing the first estimation of disorder abundance associated to plant infection, showed that the proteome activated in the strawberry red fruit during the active fungal propagation is remarkably depleted in disorder. On the other hand, in the resistant white fruit, no significant disorder reduction is observed in the proteins expressed in response to fungal infection. Four representative proteins, FvSMP, FvPRKRIP, FvPCD-4 and FvFAM32A-like, predicted as mainly disordered and never experimentally characterized before, were isolated, and the absence of structure was validated at the secondary and tertiary level using circular dichroism and differential scanning fluorimetry. Their quaternary structure was also established using light scattering. The results are discussed considering the role of protein disorder in plant defense.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Tomàs Di Domenico for initial help with the dataset.
Financial source
LZ was the recipient of a fellowship awarded by the University of Bologna. FIRB Futuro in Ricerca Grant RBFR08ZSXY to ST and RFO2010 grant from the University of Bologna to BZ and EB are acknowledged.
Author contributions
EB and LZ carried out protein expression and purification. LZ performed the BLAST2GO analysis on the protein dataset. EC carried out the actualization of gene expression data on F. vesca genome under the supervision of AC. BZ and LZ performed the disorder prediction analysis. ST contributed to disorder prediction. EB and BZ equally supported this research intellectually and financially, coordinated the group, wrote the manuscript and prepared the figures. All authors contribute to manuscript writing and editing and approved the final version of the paper.
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Baraldi, E., Coller, E., Zoli, L. et al. Unfoldome variation upon plant-pathogen interactions: strawberry infection by Colletotrichum acutatum . Plant Mol Biol 89, 49–65 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-015-0353-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-015-0353-7