ABSTRACT
Maize (Zea mays L.) being one of the important food, feed and forage crops, has contributed much to modern agriculture and economy. Maize has also been an excellent model cereal crop for biological studies (Erdelská and Sýkorová 1997), especially after the release of its draft genome in 2009 (Schnable et al. 2009). During maize life cycle, thousands of proteins function spatially and temporally to confer programmed development and to cope with changing environments. Proteomics is a powerful tool to explore various features of proteins as a whole, elucidating their abundance, activity, structure, posttranslational modifi cation or network interactions (Wright et al. 2012) providing lots of clues on their activities in a given organ, developmental stage, or environment. Furthermore, combining maize proteomic data with genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic information created a new research area called integrated system biology.
