Plant small heat shock proteins - evolutionary and functional diversity

Small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) are an ubiquitous protein family found in archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. In plants, as in other organisms, sHSPs are upregulated by stress and are proposed to act as molecular chaperones to protect other proteins from stress-induced damage. sHSPs share an 'α-crystallin domain' with a β-sandwich structure and a diverse N-terminal domain. Although sHSPs are 12-25 kDa polypeptides, most assemble into oligomers with ≥ 12 subunits. Plant sHSPs are particularly diverse and numerous; some species have as many as 40 sHSPs. In angiosperms this diversity comprises ≥ 11 sHSP classes encoding proteins targeted to the cytosol, nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, chloroplasts, mitochondria and peroxisomes. The sHSPs underwent a lineage-specific gene expansion, diversifying early in land plant evolution, potentially in response to stress in the terrestrial environment, and expanded again in seed plants and again in angiosperms. Understanding the structure and evolution of plant sHSPs has progressed, and a model for their chaperone activity has been proposed. However, how the chaperone model applies to diverse sHSPs and what processes sHSPs protect are far from understood. As more plant genomes and transcriptomes become available, it will be possible to explore theories of the evolutionary pressures driving sHSP diversification.