Quantitative proteomics analysis by iTRAQ revealed underlying changes in thermotolerance of Arthrospira platensis

Growth temperature is a critical factor that affects cultivation of Arthrospira platensis which is a type of cyanobacterium widely known as Spirulina that has significant commercial value. To investigate the molecular mechanism underlying the thermotolerance of Spirulina, differential protein expression profiling was carried out using iTRAQ-based quantitative proteomic analysis. This study only analyzed changes in thylakoids. Among the 2085 proteins quantified, 43 differentially expressed proteins were selected based on the fold change cutoff scores of ≥2 or ≤0.5 for up-regulation or down-regulation, respectively. An analysis of these 43 proteins found that 23% of them are photosynthetic system proteins which include photosynthetic enzymes and pigment proteins. The dynamic change of these proteins indicates that photosynthetic system functions were profoundly affected under heat stress and the light-dependent reactions were probably the most sensitive to temperature changes. Meanwhile, to cope with the low energy production due to impaired photosynthesis there was a considerable down-shift in protein synthesis which is a very energy demanding process. The impaired photosynthesis led to low energy generation that was compensated by a down-shift in translation (the most energy-demanding process) and an up-shift of glycolysis. The reduction of many ribosome proteins may lead to a loss in translation efficiency; therefore, Spirulina may adopted a different mechanism to increase translational elongation under heat stress to compensate for this loss, such as elevate L7/L12 proteins. Changes were also found in the classical heat shock proteins, the ROS scavenging system, DNA-binding proteins, and some membrane proteins. In conclusion, this research demonstrate that heat stress induces profound changes in cellular physiology and shed light on the mechanism of the heat stress response and thermotolerance of Arthrospira platensis.

Arthrospira platensis, widely known as Spirulina, is a type of cyanobacteria which is cultivated at large scale for it great commercial value. It has become a consensus that continually increasing temperature due to global warming is bringing serious threat to agriculture, including the Spirulina cultivation. High temperature not only limits biomass accumulation by Spirulina, but also changes the composition of nutrition. Therefore there is a greater need than ever before to understand how Spirulina tolerates and cope with high temperature. In this study, we for the first time applied the iTRAQ-based quantitative proteomic technology to investigate the thermotolerance of Spirulina. Our results showed that many biological processes were altered by heat stress. Most significantly, we found that heat stress harmed the photosynthesis ability and caused low energy production, and to deal with this situation, energy demanding processes like protein synthesis were down-shifted and the alternative energy metabolism process glycolysis was up-shifted. Our results also show other important proteins, like the classical heat shock proteins and some antioxidant proteins, are also increased. Thus our study sheds light to our understanding of the mechanism underlying the thermotolerance of Spirulina.