Drought Stress Alters Photosynthetic and Carbohydrate-related Proteins in Leaves of Banana

Abstract

Abstract Drought is the most prominent limiting factor to crop productivity, posing a severe threat to food security. However, how plants respond to drought stress and post-drought recovery remains unclear. Therefore, this study determined the morphological and protein responses of banana plants (Musa acuminata cultivar Berangan) affected by drought stress, followed by water recovery. The results showed that drought significantly reduced the leaf area, plant height, fresh weight, stem circumference, leaf relative water content, chlorophyll contents, and root length of the bananas. In contrast, relative electrolyte leakage, proline, malondialdehyde (MDA) and hydrogen peroxide contents, and the activities of antioxidant enzymes, including catalase (CAT), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), glutathione reductase (GR), peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase, were induced in the drought-treated banana leaves. However, the relative water content, MDA and hydrogen peroxide contents, and antioxidant enzyme activities, including CAT, APX, and GR, were comparable with well-watered plants after water recovery. Changes in the protein content between well-watered, drought-stressed, and recovered banana plants were determined using tandem mass tags (TMT)-based quantitative proteomics. Of the 1,018 differentially abundant proteins, 274 were significantly changed. The identified proteins differing between the treatments were mainly related to carbohydrate, energy and amino acid metabolisms, genetic information processing, and secondary metabolite biosynthesis. Our data may assist in developing a complete proteome dataset which could be valuable for developing drought-tolerant bananas.