Quantitative proteome, phosphoproteome and acetylome analysis of Arabidopsis thaliana root responses to persistent osmotic and salinity stress.

Environmental conditions contributing to abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity result in large annual economic losses around the world. As sessile organisms, plants cannot escape the environmental stresses they encounter, but instead must adapt to survive. Previous studies investigating osmotic and/or salt responses have largely focused on understanding short-term responses (0-1h) at the transcriptomic, proteomic and phosphoproteomic level; however, our understanding of intermediate to longer-term adaptation (24h - days) is relatively limited. In addition to protein abundance and phosphorylation changes, recent evidence suggests reversible protein acetylation may be important for abiotic stress responses. Therefore, to characterize the effects of osmotic and salt stress, we undertook a label-free proteomic and PTMomic analysis of Arabidopsis roots exposed to 300mM Mannitol and 150mM NaCl for 24 h. We quantitatively assessed protein abundance, phosphorylation and acetylation.