Biology learned in school and as a first year undergraduate is easily forgotten if it is not relevant to your current research. Today’s highlighted article required me to refresh my memory of plant germ line development, so I included my basic research here.
Highlighted article: Joseph P. Calarco, Filipe Borges, Mark T.A. Donoghue, Frédéric Van Ex, Pauline E. Jullien, Telma Lopes, Rui Gardner, Frédéric Berger, José A. Feijó, Jörg D. Becker and Robert A. Martienssen (2012) Reprogramming of DNA Methylation in Pollen Guides Epigenetic Inheritance via Small RNA. Cell 151:194-205.
Germline biosynthesis: A pollen mother cell undergoes meiosis to make haploid microspores, which unevenly split into a larger vegetative cell and a small generative cell. The generative cell splits symmetrically into two – these are the plant ‘sperm’ cells. Each pollen grain contains two sperm cells, which are surrounded by a vegetative cell. The vegetative nucleus contains completely decondensed heterochromatin, but DNA in generative nuclei is tightly condensed.
The female gametophyte develops from a megaspore mother cell. Both the megaspore mother cell and pollen mother cell are specified from somatic cells in developing flowers.
Bisulphite sequencing is a DNA sequencing method which determines methylation pattern by treating DNA with sodium bisulphite before sequencing it using a conventional DNA sequencing method. Bisulphite induces the conversion of unmethylated cytosines to uracil, but this is not a perfect technique so unmethylated DNA may be recorded as methylated. Additionally, bisulphite treatment can cause DNA degradation. Sequencing the DNA of interest multiple times, in the case of Calarco et al., anywhere from 7 to 17 times, improves reliability of the method. There is a brief overview of DNA methylation in this post. (more…)
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