Proteomic for Quality: Mining the Proteome as a Strategy to Elucidate the Protein Complex Applied for Quality Improvement

Cereals are the most important staple foods worldwide. Rice is one of the “top three” cereal crops feeding more than half of the world’s population and providing a large proportion of nutrients for humans and livestock. Rice has the lowest protein content of the major cereals, which has resulted in a considerable effort being put into producing rice lines with high or low levels of protein. The major components of mature rice grain are starch, protein, and lipid. Proteins account for 10% of rice grain dry weight, and whose composition also influences rice grain quality. Despite the potential for proteins’ profile to influence rice grain quality, the role of grain proteins in rice grain quality is scarce in the literature. Enhancing the nutritional quality of staple crops can potentially offset limitations associated with yield increases, and the nutritional value of rice could thus be raised by modifying its protein content. Improving grain quality has been a major objective of plant culture management and breeding. Physiological processes and the biosynthesis of major macromolecules – such as proteins – are key to quality in cereals. Hence, the molecular basis for these processes has to be clarified, especially those affecting grain quality. The grain quality could be affected significantly by the cultivation system and environmental conditions to be agronomically important, such as water availability, temperature, fertilizer application, and salinity stresses. However, the signal transduction pathways controlling grain quality still remain largely unclear. During the last few years, considerable researches have been devoted to analyzing rice proteome. In this chapter, the proteomic research for quality has been compiled and also presented a comprehensive analysis of rice proteome.