Comprehensive Organ-Specific Profiling of Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) Proteome

The Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is a conifer native to North America that has become increasingly popular in plantations in France due to its many advantages as timber: rapid growth, quality wood, and good adaptation to climate change. Tree genetic improvement programs require knowledge of a species’ genetic structure and history and the development of genetic markers. The very slow progress in this field, for Douglas fir as well as the entire genus Pinus, can be explained using the very large size of their genomes, as well as by the presence of numerous highly repeated sequences. Proteomics, therefore, provides a powerful way to access genomic information of otherwise challenging species. Here, we present the first Douglas fir proteomes acquired using nLC-MS/MS from 12 different plant organs or tissues. We identified 3975 different proteins and quantified 3462 of them, then examined the distribution of specific proteins across plant organs/tissues and their implications in various molecular processes. As the first large proteomic study of a resinous tree species with organ-specific profiling, this short note provides an important foundation for future genomic annotations of conifers and other trees.