Abstract:
During barley germination, the aleurone layer secretes most of the enzymes required to degrade the endosperm, many of which are yet to be characterized. We used activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) to detect a range of active enzymes extracted from aleurone layers isolated from grains of a commercial malting barley variety incubated with or without gibberellic acid (GA). Enzymes found to be induced by GA were putative aleurains, cathepsin-B-like proteases and serine hydrolases. By using an inhibitory sugar panel, a specific active retaining β-glycosidase in the barley aleurone was identified as a putative xylanase. Our results show that ABPP can be used rapidly to identify a variety of active enzyme isoforms in cereal aleurone without the need for enzyme purification.