Paper accepted: Proteomic analysis of S-nitrosation sites during somatic embryogenesis in Brazilian pine, Araucaria angustifolia (Bertol.) Kuntze

Today, a paper of our doctoral alumnus André Wendt dos Santos together with our current post-doctoral researcher Ratna Singh has been accepted for publication in the journal “Frontiers in Plant Sciences”, in a Special Issue on Forest Tree Proteomics. André had been one of our first international doctoral candidates who had won a doctoral fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD. After obtaining his doctoral degree in 2005, he went back to his native Brazil for a series of post-doctoral research projects. In his doctoral project, he had worked on somatic embryogenesis in Brazilian pine, an endangered native conifer of South America. He still continues working on the subject and recently, in a proteomic study on S-nitrosation during somatic embryogenesis, he identified a set of proteins that appear to be regulated by this post-translational modification during this developmental process. Surprisingly, one of these proteins was a chitinase, one that he had already identified earlier in our lab as possibly being involved in embryogenesis. He contacted Ratna to secure her help in a bioinformatics study on the impact of S-nitrosation on a cysteine residue close to the substrate binding site of the enzyme. This suggested that the formation or breaking of a disulfide bridge close to the active site may be involved in regulating the catalytic activity of the enzyme. For now, this is a hypothesis only, but we hope to welcome André back in our lab sometime soon for a research visit in which he might be able to experimentally confirm this hypothesis.