植物生理

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 ...

Protein function is often mediated by the formation of stable or transient complexes. Here we present a method for testing protein–protein interactions in plants designated bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC). The advantages of BiFC are its simplicity, reliabili ...

High-resolution cellular analysis will help answer many important questions in plant biology including how genetic information is differentially used to enable the formation and development of the plant body. By comparing transcriptome data from distinct cell types during vari ...

Understanding the development of an organ requires knowledge of gene, protein, and metabolite expression in the specific cell types and tissues that comprise the organ. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) is an efficient method to isolate specific cells of interest, and the inf ...

To get insight into molecular mechanisms governing plant development, the dynamics of abundance and cellular localisation of signalling components need to be understood. Luciferase and green fluorescent protein (GFP)-derived reporters are suitable markers to determine dyn ...

Arabidopsis is the dominating model species for plant developmental biology, but other species serve as models for processes that cannot be studied in Arabidopsis, such as compound leaf or wood formation, or to test the universality of developmental mechanisms initially identified in ...

Gene expression patterns are important determinants of a cell’s state, and changes in the expression profile indicate adaptation processes as a response to developmental transitions or environmental changes. Assaying gene expression can, therefore, help to elucidate mechani ...