Discordance between protein and transcript levels detected by selected reaction monitoring

Expression levels between transcript and protein are not always correlated. In the present study, the abundance of protein PDR9/ABCG37 in 3 Arabidopsis pdr9/abcg37 mutant alleles was evaluated using selected reaction monitoring analysis. The results showed that protein and mRNA expression levels were similar in 2 mutant alleles. The mRNA expression levels in another mutant, determined by both semi-quantitative and quantitative RT-PCR, were similar to the wild-type, although the abundance of protein was about half the abundance of the wild-type. These results suggested that using only mRNA expression levels to infer protein abundance, compare mutants or responses to various stimuli may lead to incorrect interpretation and conclusions.