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Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is one of the world's most valuable spices, renowned for its distinctive aroma, flavor, and pharmacological properties derived from apocarotenoids such as crocin, picrocrocin, and safranal, which accumulate in the stigmas during flower development. Despite their economic and medicinal importance, the molecular regulation of apocarotenoid biosynthesis across floral developmental stages remains poorly understood, particularly at the proteomic level. To address this gap, we applied an LC-MS/MS-based proteomic approach combined with bioinformatic and structural analyses to characterize stage-specific protein expression across five developmental stages: corm with floral shoot buds (A1), flower inside the sheath (S1), just outside the sheath (S2), flower at unopened state (S3), and flower at opened state (S4). Differential abundance analysis, gene ontology enrichment, STRING-based protein-protein interaction networks, KEGG pathway mapping, and structural modeling identified 57 developmentally regulated proteins linked to stigma differentiation and apocarotenoid metabolism. Stage-specific protein sets comprising 128 (A1), 44 (S1), 38 (S2), 29 (S3), and 29 (S4) proteins were selected using stringent statistical thresholds and validated through Limma-based differential expression analysis. Key enzymes, including PSY2, CCD2, ALDH2B4, and UGT707B1, emerged as central regulators of apocarotenoid biosynthesis during floral maturation. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive proteomic framework underlying stigma development and apocarotenoid accumulation in saffron, offering valuable molecular targets for improving metabolite yield and quality. The data supporting this study have been deposited in the ProteomeXchange repository under the identifier PXD076029.
Muduli et al. (Sat,) studied this question.