ABSTRACT
Small secreted proteins play an important role in plant development, as well as in reactions to changes in the environment. In Arabidopsis thaliana, they are predominantly members of highly expanded families, such as the pathogenesis-related (PR) 1-like protein family, whose most studied member PR1 is involved in plant defense responses by a so far unknown mechanism, or Clavata3/Endosperm Surrounding Region (CLE) protein family, whose members’ functions in the development are well described. Our survey of the existing literature for the two families showed a lack of details on their localization, trafficking, and exocytosis. Therefore, in order to uncover the modes of their secretion, we tested the hypothesis that a direct link between the secreted cargoes and the secretion regulators such as Rab GTPases, SNAREs, and exocyst subunits could be established using in silico co-expression and clustering approaches. We employed several independent techniques to uncover that only weak co-expression links could be found for limited numbers of secreted cargoes and regulators. We propose that there might be particular spatio-temporal requirements for PR1 and CLE proteins to be synthesized and secreted, and efforts to experimentally cover these discrepancies should be invested along with functional studies.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (MŠMT) project and European Regional Development Fund project CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000738 “Centre for Experimental Plant Biology”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2022.2163340.