Analysis of durum wheat proteome changes under marine and fungal biostimulant treatments using large-scale quantitative proteomics: A useful dataset of durum wheat proteins

International audienceDurum wheat requires high nitrogen inputs to obtain the high protein concentration necessary to satisfy pasta and semolina quality criteria. Optimizing plant nitrogen use efficiency is therefore of major importance for wheat grain quality. Here, we studied the impact on grain yield, protein concentration, and for the first time on protein composition of a marine (DPI4913) and a fungal (AF086) biostimulants applied to plant leaves. A large-scale quantitative proteomics analysis of wheat flour samples led to a dataset of 1471 identified proteins. Quantitative analysis of 1391 proteins revealed 26 and 38 proteins with a significantly varying abundance after DPI4913 and AF086 treatment, respectively, with 14 proteins in common. Major effects affected proteins involved in grain technological properties like grain hardness, in storage functions with the gluten protein gamma-gliadin, in regulation processes with transcription regulator proteins, and in stress responses with biotic and abiotic stress defense proteins. The involvement of biostimulants in the abiotic stress response was further suggested by an increase in water-use efficiency for both DPI4913 (15.4%) and AF086 (9.9%) treatments. Overall, our work performed in controlled conditions showed that DPI4913 and AF086 treatments promoted grain yield while maintaining protein concentration, and positively affected protein composition for grain quality. Data are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD012469. Significance We performed a large-scale quantitative proteomics study of the total protein extracts from flour samples to determine the effect of biostimulant treatment on the protein composition of durum wheat grain. To our knowledge, only a few studies in the literature have applied proteomic approaches to study durum wheat grains and even less to the effect of biostimulants on the protein composition of durum wheat grain. Moreover, most approaches used fractional extraction of proteins to target reserve proteins followed by two-dimensional elec-trophoresis (2-DE) or two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) that suffers from a low identification rate of proteins. We identified and quantified a large protein dataset of about 1400 proteins and determined molecular functions of proteins affected by biostimu-lants treatments