Poster: Reproductive development

Abs # 342: Flower proteome—changes in protein spectrum during the advanced stages of rose petal development

Presenter:	Dafny-Yelin, Mery , dafni@agri.huji.ac.il
Authors	Dafny-Yelin, Mery  (A)   Guterman, Inna  (A)   Menda, Naama  (A)   Weiss, David  (A)   Adam, Zach  (A)   Vainstein, Alexander  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): The Institute of Plant Sciences Faculty of Agricultural Food and Environmental Quality Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Flowering is a unique and highly programmed process, but hardly anything is known about the developmentally regulated proteome changes in petals. Here we employed proteomic/genomic technologies to study petal development in rose (Rosa hybrida). Using 2D-PAGE, we generated stage-specific (closed bud, mature flower and flower at anthesis) petal protein maps with ca. 1000 unique protein spots. Eighty-three of these proteins were identified by mass spectrometry, annotated and classified into functional groups. Expression analyses of all resolved protein spots revealed that almost 30% of them were stage-specific, with ca. 90 protein spots for each stage. Most of the proteins exhibited differential expression during petal development, whereas only ca. 6% were constitutively expressed. The generated proteome data was compared to that of RNA, the latter generated by microarrays and northern analyses. In ca. half of the studied cases (29 out of 48 analyzed proteins), the expression patterns at the protein and RNA levels did not match. Moreover, we show that the same gene may correspond to several different proteins with different expression patterns. Hence, the results presented here reveal the importance of translational/post-translational regulation in the developmental programs that regulate petal functionality.