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Differential distribution of amino acids in plants

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Abstract

Plants are a rich source of amino acids and their individual abundance in plants is of great significance especially in terms of food. Therefore, it is of utmost necessity to create a database of the relative amino acid contents in plants as reported in literature. Since in most of the cases complete analysis of profiles of amino acids in plants was not reported, the units used and the methods applied and the plant parts used were different, amino acid contents were converted into relative units with respect to lysine for statistical analysis. The most abundant amino acids in plants are glutamic acid and aspartic acid. Pearson’s correlation analysis among different amino acids showed that there were no negative correlations between the amino acids. Cluster analysis (CA) applied to relative amino acid contents of different families. Alismataceae, Cyperaceae, Capparaceae and Cactaceae families had close proximity with each other on the basis of their relative amino acid contents. First three components of principal component analysis (PCA) explained 79.5% of the total variance. Factor analysis (FA) explained four main underlying factors for amino acid analysis. Factor-1 accounted for 29.4% of the total variance and had maximum loadings on glycine, isoleucine, leucine, threonine and valine. Factor-2 explained 25.8% of the total variance and had maximum loadings on alanine, aspartic acid, serine and tyrosine. 14.2% of the total variance was explained by factor-3 and had maximum loadings on arginine and histidine. Factor-4 accounted 8.3% of the total variance and had maximum loading on the proline amino acid. The relative content of different amino acids presented in this paper is alanine (1.4), arginine (1.8), asparagine (0.7), aspartic acid (2.4), cysteine (0.5), glutamic acid (2.8), glutamine (0.6), glycine (1.0), histidine (0.5), isoleucine (0.9), leucine (1.7), lysine (1.0), methionine (0.4), phenylalanine (0.9), proline (1.1), serine (1.0), threonine (1.0), tryptophan (0.3), tyrosine (0.7) and valine (1.2).

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Acknowledgements

The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research, College of Sciences Research Centre, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for supporting the project. Vinod Kumar is thankful to the University Grants Commission, New Delhi for providing research fellowship for this work.

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    1. Department of Botanical and Environmental Sciences, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India

      Vinod Kumar, Anket Sharma, Ravdeep Kaur, Ashwani Kumar Thukral & Renu Bhardwaj

    2. Department of Botany, DAV University, Sarmastpur, Jalandhar, India

      Vinod Kumar

    3. Department of Botany and Microbiology, Faculty of Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, 11451, Saudi Arabia

      Parvaiz Ahmad

    4. Department of Botany, S.P. College, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, 190001, India

      Parvaiz Ahmad

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    V. Kumar and A. Sharma have contributed equally to this work.

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    Kumar, V., Sharma, A., Kaur, R. et al. Differential distribution of amino acids in plants. Amino Acids 49, 821–869 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-017-2401-x

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