Abstract
Papain-like cysteine proteases (PLCP) are prominent peptidases found in most living organisms. In plants, PLCPs was divided into nine subgroups based on functional and structural characterization. They are key enzymes in protein proteolysis and involved in numerous physiological processes. In this paper, we reviewed the updated achievements of physiological roles of plant PLCPs in germination, development, senescence, immunity, and stress responses.
Introduction
Proteases include diverse families (e.g., cysteine-, serine-, aspartic-, metallo-, and threonine-proteases) and play crucial roles in protein proteolysis (van der Hoorn, 2008). Based on the evolutionary relationships, they have been subdivided into 61 clans of 253 families (Rawlings et al., 2016). Among them, papain-like cysteine proteases (PLCPs), featuring a nucleophilic cysteine thiol at the active site (i.e., Cys, His, and Asn), are one of the most abundant groups of cysteine proteases (Rawlings et al., 2010).
Papain-like cysteine proteases are found in most organisms, including virus (Rawlings et al., 1992), bacteria (), yeast (), protozoa, plants, and animals (Rawlings et al., 2010; ). These enzymes are produced as inactive precursors with a signal peptide for protein secretion and an auto-inhibitory prodomain to prevent unwanted protein degradation (Figure 1; ). The active protease domain contains the catalytic triad Cys-His-Asn (Figure 1).
FIGURE 1
Papain-like cysteine proteases genes belong to a large multigenic family with 31, 43, 40, 26, 40, and 24 PLCP family members were identified in Arabidopsis, rubber, cassava, castor, poplar, and grapevine, respectively, and they were divided into 9 subfamilies based on structural characteristics (Figures 1, 2;
FIGURE 2

Phylogenetic analysis of PLCPs in Arabidopsis, rice, maize, barley, and Brassica rapa. Sequence alignment was performed using MUSCLE and the phylogenetic tree was constructed using bootstrap maximum likelihood tree (1000 replicates) method of MEGA6.
FIGURE 3

PLCPs play important functions in multiple processes of plant growth including seed germination, PCD, abiotic stress and immunity. The genes implicated in each process are discussed in this review.
Table 1
| PLCP | Species | Function | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| EP-B | Barley | Induced expression in the germinating seeds; | |
| Degrade the endosperm storage proteins to provide | |||
| nitrogenous nutrients for young seedlings. | |||
| Pap-1 | Barley | Involved in grain protein mobilization during germination; | |
| Silencing decreased germination rate and delayed | |||
| senescence process. | Velasco-Arroyo et al., 2016. | ||
| CathB | Arabidopsis | Mutants displayed reduced PCD during abiotic stress and | |
| endoplasmic reticulum stress. | |||
| Pap-1/6/9 | Barley | Inhibition of cathepsins increased the stress-induced | |
| microspore embryogenesis. | |||
| CP14 | Tobacco | Silencing delayed PCD of suspensor. | Zhao et al., 2013. |
| CEP1 | Arabidopsis | Mutants delayed tapetal PCD and decreased pollen | Zhang D. et al., 2014 |
| production. | |||
| SAG12 | Arabidopsis | Induced during senescence; | |
| Mutants decreased yield under low nitrogen (LN) conditions. | |||
| SAG12-H1RD21 | Rubber tree | Highly expressed only in senescent leaves. | Zou et al., 2017a. |
| 1A | Arabidopsis | Involved in dehydration stress; Mutants enhanced susceptibility to Botrytis cinerea. | |
| RD19A | Arabidopsis | Involved in dehydration stress; Mutants enhanced susceptibility to Ralstonia solanacearum. | |
| CP | Wheat | Increased expression under abiotic stress and played a role in water deficit; Silencing enhanced tolerance to salt and osmotic stress. | Zang et al., 2010 |
| CP20.1 | Pepper Brassica napus | Ectopic expression leads to premature degradation of tapetum, involvement in tapetum degradation and pollen wall synthesis. | Xiao et al., 2014.Song et al., 2016; |
| SPCP2 | Sweet potato | Enhanced resistance to drought and salt stress when overexpressing;Increased sensitivity to drought stress when overexpressing. | |
| Mir1 | Maize | Induced expression at wounding site;Enhanced resistance to caterpillar;Acts as ethylene signal conferring resistance to corn leaf aphid; | |
| AALP | Arabidopsis Tomato | Increased protein activity in senescent leaves, mutants delay leaf senescence.Up-regulated upon pathogen attack and inhibited by pathogen-derived inhibitors; | Pruzinska et al., 2017. |
| Rcr3 | Tomato | Resistance to Phytophthora infestans, Cladosporium fulvum, and Globodera rostochiensis. | |
| Pip1 C14 | Nicotiana benthamiana | Silencing plants susceptible to C. fulvum, Pseudomonas syringae, and P. infestans. | |
| XCP2 | Arabidopsis | Silencing plants susceptible to P. infestans. Mutants decreased susceptibility to R. solanacearum. | Zhang B. et al., 2014. |
Catalog of plant papain-like cysteine proteases (PLCPs) involved in germination, development, senescence, immunity, and stress responses.
PLCPs Function in Seed Germination
Storage, structural, metabolic, and protective proteins are stored in seeds. During germination, these seed proteins were mobilized or degraded to nourish growing seedlings. These processes were
mainly triggered by PLCPs (
In view of the important roles of PLCP proteins in seed germination, the regulation of PLCPs activity should play essential function in seed germination and seedling development. Phytocystatins (PhyCys) are a group of small proteins and can directly inhibit PLCPs activity (
The nutrients provided by plant seeds are the basis for the growth and development of offspring. PLCPs are one of the key factors to initiate and complete this process (Szewinska et al., 2016). It is well known that seed germination may be destroyed under adversity stresses, resulting in the inability to form seedlings. Under stress conditions, the activity of PLCPs and their regulatory factors may be destroyed, but the specific mechanism of “destruction” and the resulting consequences need further analysis in various plants.
PLCPs Associated With Programmed Cell Death
Programmed cell death (PCD) is a highly ordered and genetically controlled process that removes unwanted or damaged cells in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms, playing important roles in protecting against environmental stresses and pathogen invasions. DNA fragmentation, reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation and organelle “degradation” were general features of PCD process. PCD played essential functions throughout the plant’s life cycle from embryogenesis to plant death (Staal and Dixelius, 2007;
Papain-like cysteine proteases are essential regulators of plant PCD. In Arabidopsis, a lot of PLCPs were reported in the PCD of tracheary element (TE), tapetum, suspensor, and ER-stress-induced cell death, respectively (Zhao et al., 2000;
Tapetum plays a crucial role in pollen development by secreting numerous nutritive proteins, enzymes, and sporopollenin precursors for pollen maturation (
PLCPs Involved in Leaf Senescence
Leaf senescence is a physiological process that recycling the endogenous nutrients from the senesencing leaves to support the growth of younger leaves and reproductive organs. Protein breakdown is one of the most fundamentally important reactions during leaf senescent and PLCPs play important functions in protein proteolysis during leaf senescence (
SAG12 exhibits a strictly senescence-associated expression pattern in leaves and thus has been widely used as a senescence marker gene (
Based on the senescence-specific characterization of SAG12, an autoregulatory senescence inhibition system (PSAG12-IPT) has been explored by fusing the SAG12 promoter (PSAG12) to a cytokinin-biosynthesizing enzyme-isopentenyl transferase (IPT) (
In summary, leaf senescence is a finely regulated process involving the degradation of many substances. The enzymatic reactions catalyzed by PLCPs encoded by senescence-associated genes (SAGs) are an important pathway for protein degradation. At present, SAG12 is the most intensively studied senescence-associated PLCPs, whose function has been characterized in many species. In addition to SAG12 and other PLCPs that have been studied, there are many more PLCPs participating to leaf senescence remain largely unknown.
PLCPs Mediate Plant Abiotic Stress Response
Plants are constantly challenged by environmental abiotic stresses (e.g., heat, drought, cold, or salinity). Plants have evolved delicate mechanisms to cope with abiotic stresses by reprogramming the expression of gene subsets and inducing an adaptive response. The recycling of proteins by plant proteolysis is a primary defense line for plant survival. Among protease families, PLCPs are the predominantly up-regulated plant proteases, and exhibit increased expression in response to multiple environmental stresses (Rabbani et al., 2003;
AtRD21A and AtRD19A, two important protein markers for dehydration stress adaptation, were highly induced by drought and salt stresses (
Protein hydrolysis is very important for plants to response adversity stresses. In addition to enhancing plant resistance to stress, many PLCP proteases also accelerate plant leaf senescence or enhance plant sensitivity to abiotic stress. In this case, plants often regulate the gene expression or protein activity of PLCPs through some regulators to promote plant growth and increase crop yield. The currently deep-study regulatory factors of PLCP are phytocystatins, and many researches have revealed that the overexpression of phytocystatins significantly delays plant leaf senescence and increases stress tolerance, and the direct inhibition of protease activity may be the main reason (
PLCPs Play a Key Role in Plant Immunity
In natural environment, plants are also attacked by a diverse array of pathogens and pests, including bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, nematodes, insects, and microbes. Many studies have highlighted the importance of PLCP in defense against plant pathogen. In most cases, a lack of PLCP expression leads to alterations of pathogen resistance because PLCP mutations are more susceptible to pathogen infection (
Maize inbred resistance 1 (Mir1), a secreted maize PLCP that localized in vesicle, showed high accumulation at the wounding site after larval feeding (
Tomato Rcr3 (Required for Cladosporium resistance-3) and Pip1 (Phytophthora inhibited protease-1) were up-regulated upon pathogen challenge and their activities were inhibited by pathogen-derived inhibitors (
Taken together, these data demonstrate that PLCPs play a determinative role in regulating pathogen defense. However, as can be seen from the above studies, previous studies have focused on the reduction of plant immunity after mutation of PLCP genes, but there is relatively little understanding of how PLCPs participate in plant immune defenses; furthermore, PLCPs play a key role in the plant defense hormone signaling pathways such as ET- and SA-pathway. We have known that the coordinated interaction among various defensive hormones of plant is crucial for the plant immunity. Therefore, studying the role of PLCPs in various plant hormone pathways and the mechanism of action will be an effective way to understand how PLCPs maintain or enhance plant immunity. On the other hand, synthetically revealing the role of PLCPs in plant immune processes is another important research content for the comprehensive exploration of plant immune mechanisms.
Concluding Remarks
Over the past few years, the study of plant PLCPs has widened considerably, and deciphering the molecular function of these proteases is advanced. PLCPs have a broad substrate specificity, and their protein location, activation and inactivation are tightly regulated in a number of ways. However, the direct link between PLCPs activation and perception in plant signaling has not been fully explored. Functional redundancy of PLCPs has hampered defining their biological functions. Therefore, multiple experimental approaches including double or even triple mutants are needed to address its biological functions. Clearly, further investigation is required to understand how PLCPs perceive stresses and signals and what is the downstream players in PLCP pathways. Sensitive and novel techniques, such as quantitative proteomics and labeling probes, were used to uncover protease substrates and function (
Statements
Author contributions
HL and ZZ conceived and wrote the review. MH, QW, and LC critically reviewed the manuscript. All authors listed approved it for publication.
Funding
The authors are financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Provincial Science and Technology (No. 182300410063), Key Scientific Research Projects of Henan Higher Education Institutions (No. 18A180031), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1604112), the Funding Scheme for Young Core Teachers of Henan Province (2017), and Nanhu Scholars Program for Young Scholars of Xinyang Normal University.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Summary
Keywords
papain-like cysteine proteases, programmed cell death, immunity, stress responses, senescence
Citation
Liu H, Hu M, Wang Q, Cheng L and Zhang Z (2018) Role of Papain-Like Cysteine Proteases in Plant Development. Front. Plant Sci. 9:1717. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2018.01717
Received
01 August 2018
Accepted
05 November 2018
Published
04 December 2018
Volume
9 - 2018
Edited by
Michael James Considine, The University of Western Australia, Australia
Reviewed by
Barend Juan Vorster, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Zhi Zou, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, China
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© 2018 Liu, Hu, Wang, Cheng and Zhang.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Zaibao Zhang, zaibaozhang79@163.com
This article was submitted to Plant Physiology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Plant Science
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