Abstract
During the cell cycle, microtubules (MTs) are modeled into several higher-order structures that play important roles in cell shape determination, morphogenesis, and cell division. MT-associated proteins (MAPs) are essential for creating and maintaining these MT structures. In plant cells, there are unique MT structures that may require variety of plant-specific MAPs. To understand regulatory mechanisms of plant MTs, we here screened novel MAPs from Arabidopsis.
We previously reported a proteome analysis of MAP fractions prepared from the mini-protoplasts of suspension-cultured Arabidopsis cells. In the MAP-enriched fractions, we identified 745 proteins including 246 novel unknown proteins (Hamada et al., the 2010 JSPP meeting). Here we cloned 13 full-length cDNA among the 20 most abundant novel proteins with the highest mascot scores. When expressed transiently as GFP fusions in Arabidopsis leaf epidermal cells, six proteins were co-localized with the MT marker.
