Post-translational modifications of plant cell wall proteins and peptides: A survey from a proteomics point of view

Plant cell wall proteins (CWPs) and peptides are important players in cell walls contributing to their assembly and their remodeling during development and in response to environmental constraints. Since the rise of proteomics technologies at the beginning of the 2000's, the knowledge of CWPs has greatly increased leading to the discovery of new CWP families and to the description of the cell wall proteomes of different organs of many plants. Conversely, cell wall peptidomics data are still lacking. In addition to the identification of CWPs and peptides by mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics, proteomics has allowed to describe their post-translational modifications (PTMs). At present, the best known PTMs consist in proteolytic cleavage, N-glycosylation, hydroxylation of P residues into hydroxyproline residues (O), O-glycosylation and glypiation. In this review, the methods allowing the capture of the modified proteins based on the specific properties of their PTMs as well as the MS technologies used for their characterization are briefly described. A focus is done on proteolytic cleavage leading to protein maturation or release of signaling peptides and on O-glycosylation. Some new technologies, like top-down proteomics and terminomics, are described. They aim at a finer description of proteoforms resulting from PTMs or degradation mechanisms. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Plant Proteomics--a bridge between fundamental processes and crop production, edited by Dr. Hans-Peter Mock.