Tag: Plant Reproduction

Each plant species has a defined window of time during which flowers can be pollinated in order to trigger fruit or seed development. After this time, unpollinated flowers undergo a form of senescence culminating in programmed cell death (PCD). A detailed understanding of this cell death process is thus…

Female gametophytes (FG) of angiosperms contain eight nuclei and seven cells, distributed in a defined manner. In the micropylar end of the FG there are two synergid cells and the haploid egg, while in the central cell there are two polar nuclei. The synergid cells are responsible for attracting the…

At some point, most biology students learn the term “dioecy” (two houses), which refers to the separation of male and female function into different individuals, a characteristic that is common in animals but less so in flowering plants. About 6% of angiosperms and 65% of gymnosperms are dioecious,…

Genes (protein-coding or noncoding) and transposable elements (TEs) are the main characters in the genomic landscape, but there are few reported systems where we have seen all acting together to produce a phenotype. Oliver and collaborators analyzed miRNA populations during pollen maturation in an outstanding…

Release of scents or volatile compounds influence pollinator preference for or localisation of many flora. In excess of 1,700 distinct floral scents have been classified to date, yet our understanding of biosynthetic processes associated with many scents is limited. Kang et al. recently determined the…

In plants with sexual reproduction, the male contribution (two sperm cells) is necessary to fertilize two female cells, the egg cell that gives rise to the embryo and the central cell that gives rise to the endosperm. In contrast, apomictic plants (0.1% of flowering plants spread over 120 genera) don´t…

Billey et al. uncover the roles of LARP6C as a translational repressor in dormant pollen and an activator when the pollen “awakens”. The Plant Cell (2021) https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koab131  By Elodie Billey1,2,3, Said Hafidh4, Cécile Bousquet-Antonelli1,2 1 CNRS LGDP-UMR5096, 58 Av.…

Gene expression is primarily controlled by transcriptional regulatory proteins able to recognize and bind short DNA sequences in downstream targets. Understanding how DNA-binding proteins achieve high precision and switch on/off the transcription of selected genes at a specific developmental stage or…