Unveiling the gene-expression profile of pollen 英文参考文献.docVIP

Minireview Unveiling the gene-expression profile of pollen José António da Costa-Nunes and Ueli Grossniklaus Address: Institute for Plant Biology and Zürich-Basel Plant Science Centre, University of Zürich, Zollikerstrasse 107, CH-8008 Zürich, Switzerland. Correspondence: Ueli Grossniklaus. E-mail: grossnik@botinst.unizh.ch Published: 24 December 2003 Genome Biology 2003, 5:205 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2003/5/1/205 ? 2003 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Four recent papers have characterized the transcription profile of pollen grains, showing striking differences between gene expression in pollen and other plant tissues. These studies increase the number of known pollen-expressed genes by as much as 50-fold and have identified many novel genes that are potentially pollen-specific. Pollen development rapidly (up to 35 mm per hour), and are guided into the ovules, the precursors of seeds, where the two sperm are delivered to the two female reproductive cells, resulting in double fertilization [2,3]. The plant life cycle alternates between a diploid generation (the spore-producing sporophytes) and a haploid generation (the gamete-producing gametophytes). Unlike the situation in animals, in which the products of meiosis differentiate directly into gametes, the meiotic products of higher plants (called spores) undergo mitotic divisions to form multicellular haploid gametes [1]. The male gametophyte, pollen, is a highly specialized reproductive entity that performs a wide range of developmental functions, including cell specification and differentiation, cellular recognition, rapid polarized growth, chemotactic sensing, and fertilization [2]. The nucleus of the vegetative cell is larger than the nuclei of the sperm cells (Figure 1) [4,5]. This difference in size is gen- erally attributed to a dramatic condensation of the chro