The ability to control extracellular ice formation during freezing is critical to the survival of freezing-tolerant plants. Antifreeze proteins, which are proteins that have the ability to retard ice crystal growth, were recently identified as the most abundant apoplastic proteins in cold-acclimated winter rye (Secale cereale L.) leaves. In the experiments reported here, amino-terminal sequence...

Thaumatin is an intensely sweet-tasting protein that elicits sweet taste at a concentration of 50 nM, a value 100,000 times larger than that of sucrose on a molar basis. Here we attempted to produce a protein with enhanced sweetness by removing negative charges on the interacting side of thaumatin with the taste receptor. We obtained a D21N mutant which, with a threshold value 31 nM is much swe...

En France, 20 à 25 % de la population générale souffrent d’une maladie allergique. Les allergies respiratoires, prépondérantes et au premier rang des maladies chroniques l’enfant, sont majoritairement dues aux grains pollen d’arbres plantes anémophiles. sensibilisations croisées entre pollens certains aliments plus en fréquentes, étendant ainsi le profil symptomatique du respiratoire digestif v...

The cultivated almond displays a gametophytic self-incompatibility system, which avoids self-fertilization, and it is controlled by multi-allelic locus (S-locus) containing two genes specifically expressed in pistil (S-RNase) pollen (SFB). Studies on almonds with the same S-haplotype but different phenotype pointed to existence of unknown components this system explain its functioning. increase...

This study was designed to quantitatively analyze the expression of thaumatin-like protein (TLP) at the transcriptional level in different sorghum lines when they were infested with greenbugs. Three sorghum lines, Tx7000, PI550607, and PI550610, were used. RNAs were isolated from the different sorghum lines that were infested with greenbugs at different infestation times. The resultant mRNA was...

Baker's asthma is a frequent occupational allergic disease caused mainly by inhalation of cereal flour, particularly wheat flour. This review deals with the current diagnosis and immunomodulatory treatments, as well as the role of wheat allergens as molecular tools to enhance management and knowledge of this disease. The review also discusses the current status of several salt-soluble proteins ...

Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) similar to three pathogenesis-related proteins, a glucanase-like protein (GLP), a chitinase-like protein (CLP), and a thaumatin-like protein (TLP), accumulate during cold acclimation in winter rye (Secale cereale) leaves, where they are thought to modify the growth of intercellular ice during freezing. The objective of this study was to characterize the rye AFPs in th...

Thaumatin, an intensely sweet-tasting plant protein, elicits a sweet taste at 50 nM. Although the sweetness remains when thaumatin is heated at 80 °C for 4h under acid conditions, it rapidly declines when heating at a pH above 6.5. To clarify the structural difference at high pH, the atomic structure of a recombinant thaumatin I at pH 8.0 was determined at a resolution of 1.0Å. Comparison to th...

So far the allergen list of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS) allergen nomenclature subcommittee comprises 130 plant-derived food allergens. Based on sequence homology these allergens can be classified into only 27 out of 9,000 known protein families according to the Allfam database. These families comprise the prolamin and cupin superfamilies, pathogenesis related prote...

In previous work, we showed that thaumatin, an intensely sweet protein, binds to certain formed elements in taste pores of Rhesus monkey foliate papillae, namely, microvilli and small vesicles shed from microvilli, in addition to amorphous secretions (Farbman et al., 1987). We suggested that the taste bud responds to a thaumatin stimulus by shedding the small vesicles containing fragments of mi...