Proteomics analysis during aerenchyma formation in sugarcane roots

Abstract

During development of the roots of sugarcane, the cells of the cortex undertake transformations related to programmed cell death in which a series of events lead to degradation of organelles and changes in cell walls. The observations found in the literature describe the phenomenon as a result of a gene transcription program that leads to a series of events occurring in a particular order. Our research group, who demonstrated that there is indeed DNA fragmentation as well as cell wall changes, has already described this process. Recently, this PhD project has detected activity of several cell wall hydrolases that display maximal activity 3cm away from the root tip, suggesting that these enzymes could be related to the observed cell wall changes. Some proteomic analyses have been performed, confirming the sequence of events expected according to the literature for other grasses. However, it has not been possible to detect proteins related to cell wall hydrolases, even if their activity are detectable. Therefore, the present proposal aims at deepening the proteomic analyses by use of the technique DIGE in order to try to detect the hydrolytic proteins as well as to better understand the association among events related to cell wall degradation in roots of sugarcane. (AU)