Isolation of Cytosol, Microsome, Free Polysomes (FPs) and Membrane-bound Polysomes (MBPs) from Arabidopsis Seedlings.

The plant endomembrane system plays vital roles for synthesis, modification and secretion of proteins and lipids. From the classic view, only mRNAs encoding secreted proteins could be targeted to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) for translation via a co-translational translocation manner, however, recently this model has been challenged by accumulative evidence that lots of cytosolic mRNAs could also associate with ER, and that some categories of small RNAs are enriched on ER. These results suggested unrevealed functions of ER beyond our current knowledge. The large scale identification of RNAs and proteins on microsome is crucial to demonstrating the ER function and the studies will be boosted by next generation sequencing technology. This protocol provides a technical workflow to isolate the cytosol, microsome, free polysome (FP) and membrane bound polysome (MBP) from plant tissue. The isolated fractions are suitable for genome wide profiling of mRNAs, small RNAs and proteins.