植物学技术

The process of activation tagging in plants involves the random distribution of plant regulatory sequences throughout the genome. The insertion of a regulatory sequence in the vicinity of an endogenous gene can alter the transcriptional pattern of this gene resulting in a mutant phenot ...

A high throughput drought screen is described for Arabidopsis that is based on a gravimetric method to monitor and control water content of the soil. To screen for plant growth under mild drought conditions, 30% of field capacity can be used, which is equal to 2 g H2O/g dry soil. The screen allows the testing of a l ...

Medicago truncatula has been chosen as one of the two model species for legume molecular genetics and functional genomics studies. With the imminent completion of M. truncatula genome sequencing, availability of large-scale mutant populations becomes a priority. Over the last 5 years, n ...

Insertion mutants offer one of the direct ways to relate a gene to its function by employing forward or reverse genetics approaches. Both T-DNA and transposon insertional mutants are being produced in several crops, including rice, the first cereal with its complete genome sequenced. Trans ...

The central goal of current genomics research in plants, as in other organisms, is to elucidate the functions of every gene. Insertional mutagenesis using known DNA sequences such as T-DNA is a powerful tool in functional genomics. Development of efficient methods for isolating the genomic s ...

With the completion of the rice genome sequencing project, the next major challenge is the large-scale determination of gene function. A systematic phenotypic profiling of mutant collections will provide major insights into gene functions important for crop growth or production. Th ...

Flowers contain the male and female sexual organs that are critical for plant reproduction and survival. Each individual flower is produced from a floral meristem that arises on the flank of the shoot apical meristem and consists of four organ types: sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels. Because ...

B chromosomes are dispensable elements of the genome that do not recombine with the A chromosomes of the regular complement and that follow their own evolutionary pathway. Here, we survey current knowledge on the DNA/chromatin composition, origin, and drive mechanisms of B chromosomes and ...

The advent of transgenic technologies has met many challenges, both technical and political; however, these technologies are now widely applied, particularly for crop improvement. Bioengineering has resulted in plants carrying resistance to herbicides, insects, and viruses, as ...

Telomeres are highly repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes that act as protection structure for chromosome stability. The integration of telomere sequences into the genome by genetic transformation can create chromosome instability because the integrated telomere ...

We report here an efficient method for making targeted mutations in Arabidopsis thaliana genes. The approach uses zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) – enzymes engineered to create DNA double-strand breaks at specific target loci. Imprecise repair of double-strand breaks by nonhomologo ...

Gene targeting in plants through homologous recombination has been sparsely reported, although notable breakthroughs have been achieved in recent years (1). In particular, the use of zinc finger nucleases to promote homologous end joining has revived the promise that homologous gene ...

Pollen tubes grow rapidly in a strictly polarized manner as they transport male reproductive cells through female flower tissues to bring about fertilization. Vegetative pollen tube cells are an excellent model system to investigate processes underlying directional cell expan ...

In plants, gametes are formed in multicellular haploid structures, termed gametophytes. The female gametophyte of most higher plants comprises seven cells, which develop from a single haploid spore through nuclear proliferation and subsequent cellularization. The female gam ...

DNA methylation is a prominent epigenetic mark and extensively found within plant genomes. It has two major roles– first, defending the genome against invasive DNA and second, regulation of gene expression. Since the first report of 5-methylcytosine found in wheat germ, many improvements ...

All cells in a multicellular organism have the same genetic constitution, yet their appearance and function may differ enormously, due to differences in the nuclear program. Central in the establishment of this cell diversity are epigenetic marks, which are largely based on covalent modi ...

Development of multicellular organisms is based on specialized gene expression programs. Because chromatin establishes the environment for transcription, understanding composition and dynamics of chromatin is an important part of developmental biology. The knowledge ...

The quantification of molecular interactions or conformational changes can conveniently be studied by using F�rster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) as a spectroscopic ruler. The FRET phenomenon describes the transfer of energy from a donor to an acceptor molecule, if they are in close p ...

Knowledge about the identity of the interacting partners is important for the understanding of the function and the cellular activity of a given protein. Here we describe co-immunoprecipitation and pull-down as methods that are widely used for the identification and characterizati ...

A split luciferase complementation assay to study protein–protein interactions within Arabidopsis protoplasts in 96-well plates is described in this protocol. Two proteins of interest, a bait and prey, which are genetically fused to amino- and carboxy-terminal fragments of Renil ...