RESEARCH ARTI CLE STUDY OF THE POLLEN PROTEINS I N TWO CASSI A SPECI ES FROM I NDUSTRI ALLY POLLUTED AREA OF NAGPUR *Surekha Anil Kalkar Department of Botany, Institute of Science, Nagpur-440001, India ARTI CLE INFO ABSTRACT In order to determine the effect of air pollution on protein content of pollen, two species of Cassia viz. C. siamia L. and C. fistula L were studie from industrial area of Nagpur (MIDC, Hingna). Civil lines area was considered as control area. Pollen proteins were extracted, and analyzed by SDS PAGE method. Total protein content of pollen extracts was measured by method of Lowry et. al. (1951). Our investigations revealed noticeable differences in protein contents. According to observations more bands for protein were obtained for samples from control area as compared to samples from polluted area. Variations in protein contents were correlated with industrial pollution. Copyright © 2014 Surekha Anil Kalkar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. INTRODUCTION Nowadays industrial pollution is one of major air pollution. Plants growing in such areas are affected by the harmful pollutants present in polluted air released by different industries. The air around us is not free from pollutants. When we inhale this polluted air many allergic disorders occur. Polluted air contains many air borne bio-pollutants such as microorganisms, pollen grains, fungal spores, hyphae of fungi, insects debris, mites etc. Among all these agents, pollen grains and fungal spores are the most predominant allergens in the air of Nagpur (Kalkar and Patil, 1994 and Kalkar et al., 1998). Pollen grains are well known to be common causative agents in respiratory allergic disorders (Rawat et al., 2000, Gioulekas et al., 2004, D’Amato et al., 2005). The allergy caused by the pollen is due to the presence of certain allergens which are protein and glycoprotein that are capable of eliciting the formation in susceptible humans of specific skin-sensitizing through the body immune system (Knox 1979, Batanero et al., 1995). Cassia siamea and Cassia fistula are dominant avenue trees found abundantly in experimental area. The present study pertains to estimation and characterization of proteins from pollen extracts of Cassia siamea and Cassia fistula by SDS- PAGE method (Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate-Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis) MATERIALS AND METHODS Protein content was determined by Lowry et al. (1951) using Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) as standard. Extracted proteins *Corresponding author: Surekha Anil Kalkar, Department of Botany, Institute of Science, Nagpur-440001, India Were separated by 10% SDS-Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis (1μl of each pollen sample per well) and detected by Coomassie blue staining (Sadasivam and Manickam, 2001). RESULTS AND DI SCUSSI ON The Protein Content was found to be 0.78 and 0.61 in Cassia siamea whereas in Cassia fistula it was 1.0 and 0.81 (Table 1). Results of SDS-PAGE of these two pollen samples have shown four and seven bands of proteins in industrial area and control area C. siamea of have shown respectively whereas C. fistula pollen extracts of industrial and control area have shown four and five bands of proteins respectively ( Table 2, Fig.1). It was noticed from the results that some of the proteins were lost or disintegrated in industrial area. The reason may be due pollution in the area. It has been demonstrated that gaseous and particulate pollutants might influence pollen allergenic proteins in molecular structure, quantity and release (Behrendt and Becker, 2001). Pollen particles contain pollinic allergens. High environmental humidity conditions can subject the pollen particles to osmotic shock, resulting in the release of microparticles or paucimicronic particles that may contain allergenic proteins (Suphioglu et al., 1992). Researchers showed that air pollution could cause collapse and thinning of the exine, and changes in total protein content and electrophoretic profile (Majd and Mohamadi, 1992; Behrendt et al., 1997; Pelter, 1998; Emberlin, 1998 and 2000). Pollen morphological studies (LM and SEM) of Cassia fistula and Cassia siamea in polluted area have shown shrinkage, breakage of exine with particulate matter attached on surface I SSN: 0975 -833X Available online at http://www.journalcra.com International Journal of Current Research Vol. 6, Issue, 10, pp.9022--9023, October, 2014 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CURRENT RESEARCH Article History: Received 15 th July, 2014 Received in revised form 09 th August, 2014 Accepted 05 th September, 2014 Published online 25 th October, 2014 Key words: Air pollution effects, Cassia species, Protein content