Proteome Analysis of Nicotiana tabacum Suspension Cultures

Suspension cultures offer a continuous and homogeneous source of cells growing under strictly controlled conditions, and are ideally suited to study molecular processes at the cellular level. Nicotiana tabacum cell suspension cultures are widely used to study cell structure, cell cycle and cell growth in higher plants. Despite the fact that tobacco protein identification is currently hampered by the lack of public genome sequence data, tobacco suspension cells are valuable as a model system to investigate protein dynamics in the context of cellular development. This chapter offers an overview of technical approaches developed for the separation, identification and interaction mapping of the cellular tobacco proteome. A number of proteomics applications used to study molecular regulation of cell cycle, cellular development and response to pathogen attacks are discussed.