Recent advances and challenges in plant phosphoproteomics

Plants are sessile organisms that need to respond to environmental changes quickly and efficiently. They can accomplish this by triggering specialized signaling pathways often mediated by protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. Phosphorylation is a fast response that can switch on or off a myriad of biological pathways and processes. Proteomics and MS are the main tools employed in the study of protein phosphorylation. Advances in the technologies allow simultaneous identification and quantification of thousands of phosphopeptides and proteins that are essential to understanding the sophisticated biological systems and regulations. In this review, we summarize the advances in phosphopeptide enrichment and quantitation, MS for phosphorylation site mapping and new data acquisition methods, databases and informatics, interpretation of biological insights and crosstalk with other PTMs, as well as future directions and challenges in the field of phosphoproteomics.