News & Announcements
(August 2013)
A pollen tube mutant defective in arresting growth in the embryo sac
Dr. Mark Johnson lab at the Brown University published a new research article on an Arabidopsis pollen tube mutant that fails to arrest its growth (pollen tube reception) in the synergid cell of the embryo sac (female gametophyte) and release the sperm cells to complete double fertilization.
This is the first report on the male-specific defects that prevents pollen tube from completing pollen tube reception in the female gametophyte. Our lab contributed to this research article.
Reference:
Leydon AR, Beale KM, Woroniecka K, Castner E, Chen J, Horgan C, Palanivelu R, Johnson MA. (2013). Three MYB Transcription Factors Control Pollen Tube Differentiation Required for Sperm Release. Current Biology, 23(13):1209-14.
URL link to the article:
Summary:
In flowering plants, immotile sperm cells develop within the pollen grain and are delivered to female gametes by a pollen tube [1 and 2]. Upon arrival at the female gametophyte, the pollen tube stops growing and releases sperm cells for successful fertilization [3]. Several female signaling components essential for pollen tube reception have been identified [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11]); however, male components remain unknown. We show that the expression of three closely related MYB transcription factors is induced in pollen tubes by growth in the pistil. Pollen tubes lacking these three transcriptional regulators fail to stop growing in synergids, specialized cells flanking the egg cell that attract pollen tubes [12, 13, 14, 15 and 16] and degenerate upon pollen tube arrival [17 and 18]. myb triple-mutant pollen tubes also fail to release their sperm cargo. We define a suite of pollen tube-expressed genes regulated by these critical MYBs and identify transporters, carbohydrate-active enzymes, and small peptides as candidate molecular mediators of pollen tube-female interactions necessary for flowering plant reproduction. Our data indicate that de novo transcription in the pollen tube nucleus during growth in the pistil leads to pollen tube differentiation required for release of sperm cells.
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