Professor Justin Walley (standing) and research scientist Christian Montes review data from their research to better understand the contents of plant cells.
News — AMES, Iowa – Iowa State University scientists have made a significant breakthrough in scientists’ ability to identify specific proteins within individual plant cells.
Professor Justin Walley and Christian Montes, a research scientist, in the Department of Plant Pathology, Entomology and Microbiology, led the work to develop a method for single-cell proteomics, or SCP. Their findings were reported , one of the leading journals in the world of plant sciences.
They demonstrated the feasibility of using SCP to characterize the contents of two neighboring root cell types in Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant often used as a model for research.
While this type of single-cell investigation has been in use for animal studies for several years, it has been more challenging with plants due largely to their cell wall structure. To overcome this challenge, Walley and Montes used an exacting approach that dissolved the plant cell walls with an enzyme so they could carefully extract the protoplast, or living material, within.
Previously, research into the inner workings of plant cells has largely depended on bulk sampling, basically a ground-up mixture of cell types that averaged the contents across all the cells. According to the researchers, the results can be enlightening, but still may conceal important differences between individual cell types.
In this case, the researchers were able to quantify more than 3,000 proteins in the two cell types. Of those, they identified almost 600 proteins that were more abundant in one or the other kind of cell. While both cell types were similar in the number of proteins they contained – the study found the types of proteins significantly differed between the two cell types.
“Our study demonstrates that our SCP approach can identify distinct material within plant cell types, even between neighboring cells,” said Walley. "This is foundational research. It gives us a platform to locate genetic markers that can signal desirable (or not so desirable) traits, important knowledge for tomorrow’s precision breeding.”
Researchers say the next steps include improving the number of cells that can be analyzed and expanding the approach to corn and other crops.
"The beauty of this advance is to start having a better sense of what each cell is doing and even how cells work together,” Montes said. “Proteins can be mobile, but the SCP approach can help locate where the proteins originate and how cells cooperate to use them to manage the plant’s functions and respond to various biological stimuli.”
The research team also included Jingyuan Zhang and Trevor Nolan, with the Department of Biology at Duke University at the time of this study.
An on their study published in the same journal acknowledges the researchers' important role in initiating the era of single-cell proteomics "with many exciting discoveries waiting in this rapidly growing and developing field."
Funding for the project came from the Plant Sciences Institute at Iowa State University and the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station.
RSS