Research Projects

Plants have to encounter diverse environmental stresses among which high temperature stress is one of the major abiotic constrains that alters cellular proteome profile significantly. Since, chloroplast hosts several metabolic pathways that directly affects plant growth and survival, it acts as delicate environmental sensor (Lande et al. 2020). Moreover, significant proportion of heat responsive proteome is encompassed by chloroplasts, it might trigger the major components of cellular thermal response machinery (Dobra et al. 2015). Regardless of several efforts to understand the molecular basis of high temperature stress tolerance, relatively little is known about the role of chloroplast proteome dynamics in heat responses. As the progeniture of ancient photosynthetic bacteria, chloroplasts retain their own genetic material, transcription and translation machinery. The chloroplast genome encodes some of the photosynthesis, chromophore and chloroplast-housekeeping genes, while other peptides remain the nuclear origin. The abiotic stress-adaptive response of chloroplast proteome has been studies during salinity, dehydration, cold and intense light in several crop species (Joaquín-Ramos et al. 2014; Wang et al. 2015; Xu et al. 2016; Tamburino et al. 2017; Gayen et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2020). However, till date high temperature stress responsive proteome dynamics has not been investigated in any crop species. Therefore, the present study will decipher the insight of high temperature stress-induced alteration of chloroplast proteome in rice (Oryza sativa L.) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica L.). The unique temperature stress-responsive protein will be functionally characterized in order to decipher their role in providing tolerance.