Analysis of Storage of Proteins in Rice Seeds

Abstract

For several years my laboratory has been interested in characterizing rice seed proteins and studying their synthesis and deposition during seed development. Much of the work has been based on earlier work by Juliano’s group (Tecson et al. 1971; Juliano and Boulter 1976); Villareal and Juliano 1978) at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and on work doen with rice (Zhao et al. 1983) and oat seed proteins (Peterson 1978; Brinegar and Peterson 1982 a, b). In addition, others have contributed to our knowledge of rice storage proteins by (1) studying the immunological relationships among rice seed proteins and those of other seeds (Robert et al. 1985; Okita et al. 1988); (2) determining how the storage proteins are processed (Krishnan and Okita 1986; Sarker et al. 1986) and deposited in protein bodies in the endosperm (Tanaka et al. 1980; Yamagata et al. 1982); and (3) isolating and sequencing genes of the major rice storage protein classes (Higuchi and Fukazawa 1987; Takaiwa et al. 1987; Wang et al. 1987; Kim and Okita 1988 a, b; Masumura et al. 1989 a). This chapter will describe the techniques that have been used in my laboratory (Luthe 1983; Wen and Luthe 1985) to isolate the subunits of the major rice storage protein, glutelin, and methods used for in vivo labeling and electrophoretic analysis of rice and proteins.