Progress in pollen research

Time lapse video of Arabisopsis pollen grains germinating and growing pollen tubes. Credit: .

As an officer for GARNet, the Arabidopsis research network, I am happy to share the news that we can now add pollen germination to the long list of things for which our Arabidopsis can be called a model plant. The research is published in New Phytologist, and is currently in early view.

The importance of studying pollen for plant reproduction research is obvious, but it is also an excellent and widely used system for studying cell growth and development. Some plants, such as tobacco, have pollen that can be germinated on cue, and monitored in all sorts of ways as through germination, cell development, and pollen tube growth. Unfortunately brassicas, including Arabidopsis thaliana, do not have such amenable pollen.

A team of researchers from Oxford have developed a method that yields fast, reliable germination of A.thaliana pollen. The pollen tubes that grow are long and morphologically normal.

The method uses a cellulose-based membrane covering an agarose pad, all set up on a glass microscope slide. In the authors’ view, this protocol was more successful than other attempts because the environment surrounding the pollen mimics the stigma – so not only does this paper present a method of studying Arabidopsis pollen, but it provides novel information about the environmental cues required for pollen germination. The method was optimized for temperature and pH as well as the ratios of reagents used to make the materials.

Although this paper was about Arabidopsis and marks an important development for Arabidopsis researchers working on pollen and cell growth, it is also significant for Brassica researchers. The Brassica family contains many commercially important crops, and this method can surely be adapted to serve research into cabbage, oilseed rape, or other Brassica species.

Highlighted article: M. J. Rodriguez-Enriquez, S. Mehdi, H. G. Dickinson and R. T. Grant-Downton (2012) A novel method for efficient in vitro germination and tube growth of Arabidopsis thaliana pollen. New Phytologist (Early View) doi: 10.1111/nph.12037



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