AUTHOR=Soares Ana L. C. , Geilfus Christoph-Martin , Carpentier Sebastien C. 

TITLE=Genotype-Specific Growth and Proteomic Responses of Maize Toward Salt Stress

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science

VOLUME=Volume 9 - 2018

YEAR=2018

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00661

DOI=10.3389/fpls.2018.00661

ISSN=1664-462X

ABSTRACT=Salt stress in plants triggers complex physiological responses that are genotype specific. Many of those responses are not yet described and/or fully understood. In this work, we phenotyped three maize genotypes of the CIMMYT gene bank and the reference B73 genotype (NCRPIS - USA) under both control and salt stressed conditions We have ranked their growth potential and we observed significant differences in Na+ and Cl- ion accumulation. Genotype CML421 showed the slowest growth while CML451 had the lowest accumulation of ions in the leaves. The phenotyping defined the right timing for the proteomics analysis, allowing us to compare the contrasting genotypes. In general, we identified 1747 proteins, from which 209 were significantly more abundant in response to salt stress. The five most significantly enriched annotations positively correlated with stress were oxidation reduction, catabolic process, response to chemical stimulus, translational elongation and response to water. We observed a higher abundance of proteins involved in reaction to oxidative stress, dehydration, respiration and translation. The five most significantly enriched annotations negatively correlated with stress were nucleosome organization, chromatin assembly, protein-DNA complex assembly, DNA packaging and nucleosome assembly. The genotypic analysis revealed 52 proteins that were correlated to the slow growing genotype CML421. Their annotations point towards cellular dehydration and oxidative stress. Three root proteins correlated to the CML451 genotype were annotated to protein synthesis and ion compartmentalization. In conclusion, our results highlight the importance of the anti-oxidative system for acclimation to salt stress and identify potential genotypic marker proteins to salt stress responses.