Dataset Information

Distinct short-range ovule signals attract or repel Arabidopsis thaliana pollen tubes in vitro.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Pollen tubes deliver sperm after navigating through flower tissues in response to attractive and repulsive cues. Genetic analyses in maize and Arabidopsis thaliana and cell ablation studies in Torenia fournieri have shown that the female gametophyte (the 7-celled haploid embryo sac within an ovule) and surrounding diploid tissues are essential for guiding pollen tubes to ovules. The variety and inaccessibility of these cells and tissues has made it challenging to characterize the sources of guidance signals and the dynamic responses they elicit in the pollen tubes.

Results

Here we developed an in vitro assay to study pollen tube guidance to excised A. thaliana ovules. Using this assay we discerned the temporal and spatial regulation and species-specificity of late stage guidance signals and characterized the dynamics of pollen tube responses. We established that unfertilized A. thaliana ovules emit diffusible, developmentally regulated, species-specific attractants, and demonstrated that ovules penetrated by pollen tubes rapidly release diffusible pollen tube repellents.

Conclusion

These results demonstrate that in vitro pollen tube guidance to excised A. thaliana ovules efficiently recapitulates much of in vivo pollen tube behaviour during the final stages of pollen tube growth. This assay will aid in confirming the roles of candidate guidance molecules, exploring the phenotypes of A. thaliana pollen tube guidance mutants and characterizing interspecies pollination interactions.

SUBMITTER: Palanivelu R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1489931 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BACKGROUND: To understand transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs), especially the coordinated dynamic regulation between transcription factors (TFs) and their corresponding target genes during development, computational approaches would represent significant advances in the genome-wide expression analysis. The major challenges for the experiments include monitoring the time-specific TFs' activities and identifying the dynamic regulatory relationships between TFs and their target genes, both of which are currently not yet available at the large scale. However, various methods have been proposed to computationally estimate those activities and regulations. During the past decade, significant progresses have been made towards understanding pollen development at each development stage under the molecular level, yet the regulatory mechanisms that control the dynamic pollen development processes remain largely unknown. Here, we adopt Networks Component Analysis (NCA) to identify TF activities over time course, and infer their regulatory relationships based on the coexpression of TFs and their target genes during pollen development. RESULTS: We carried out meta-analysis by integrating several sets of gene expression data related to Arabidopsis thaliana pollen development (stages range from UNM, BCP, TCP, HP to 0.5 hr pollen tube and 4 hr pollen tube). We constructed a regulatory network, including 19 TFs, 101 target genes and 319 regulatory interactions. The computationally estimated TF activities were well correlated to their coordinated genes' expressions during the development process. We clustered the expression of their target genes in the context of regulatory influences, and inferred new regulatory relationships between those TFs and their target genes, such as transcription factor WRKY34, which was identified that specifically expressed in pollen, and regulated several new target genes. Our finding facilitates the interpretation of the expression patterns with more biological relevancy, since the clusters corresponding to the activity of specific TF or the combination of TFs suggest the coordinated regulation of TFs to their target genes. CONCLUSIONS: Through integrating different resources, we constructed a dynamic regulatory network of Arabidopsis thaliana during pollen development with gene coexpression and NCA. The network illustrated the relationships between the TFs' activities and their target genes' expression, as well as the interactions between TFs, which provide new insight into the molecular mechanisms that control the pollen development.