ABSTRACT
Seeds are the means of propagation for almost all crop plants and have enormous biological and commercial importance, primarily due to their potential value as a source of nutrients for mankind. Therefore, the potential quality and storability of seeds are important aspects for annual agricultural productivity. However, under long-term and/or improper storage conditions, seeds are likely to undergo deterioration that reduces the seed viability. During seed deterioration, a number of physiological and biochemical alterations take place in the seeds, the majority of which are not fully understood. Therefore, several physiological and proteomic studies, including conventional two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) and label-free approaches, have been performed to understand the aging-induced alterations in the seeds of some of the most economically important crops, including soybean, rice, wheat, and rapeseeds. These studies collectively suggest that seeds exposed to physiological deterioration, a basic feature of aging, showed lower germination and an increase in moisture, reactive oxygen species (ROS), and malondialdehyde (MDA) content, which are well-known deteriorative stress markers in plants. Moreover, proteins related to the synthesis of storage proteins, carbohydrate metabolism, signal transduction, protein destination, photosynthesis, protein folding/assembly, and nitrogen metabolism, among others, commonly showed decreased abundance in the seeds of almost all the plants during aging. In this chapter, we present an overview of the seed aging proteome to provide a better understanding of the seed aging mechanism in crop plants.
