**Glycation of Plant Proteins under Environmental Stress — Methodological Approaches, Potential Mechanisms and Biological Role**

Tatiana Bilova, Uta Greifenhagen, Gagan Paudel, Elena Lukasheva, Dominic Brauch, Natalia Osmolovskaya, Elena Tarakhovskaya, Gerd Ulrich Balcke, Alain Tissier, Thomas Vogt, Carsten Milkowski, Claudia Birkemeyer, Ludger Wessjohann and Andrej Frolov

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/61860

#### **Abstract**

Environmental stress is one of the major factors reducing crop productivity. Due to the oncoming climate changes, the effects of drought and high light on plants play an increasing role in modern agriculture. These changes are accompanied with a pro‐ gressing contamination of soils with heavy metals. Independent of their nature, envi‐ ronmental alterations result in development of oxidative stress, i.e. increase of reactive oxygen species (ROS) contents, and metabolic adjustment, i.e. accumulation of soluble primary metabolites (amino acids and sugars). However, a simultaneous in‐ crease of ROS and sugar concentrations ultimately results in protein glycation, i.e. non-enzymatic interaction of reducing sugars or their degradation products (α-dicar‐ bonyls) with proteins. The eventually resulting advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) are known to be toxic and pro-inflammatory in mammals. Recently, their presence was unambiguously demonstrated *in vivo* in stressed *Arabidopsis thaliana* plants. Currently, information on protein targets, modification sites therein, mediators and mechanisms of plant glycation are being intensively studied. In this chapter, we comprehensively review the methodological approaches for plant glycation research and discuss potential mechanisms of AGE formation under stress conditions. On the basis of these patterns and additional *in vitro* experiments, the pathways and mecha‐ nisms of plant glycation can be proposed.

**Keywords:** Advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), Ageing, Environmental stress, Glycation, Proteomics

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