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Sperm cells are passive cargo of the pollen tube in plant fertilization

Nature Plants volume 3, Article number: 17079 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Sperm cells of seed plants have lost their motility and are transported by the vegetative pollen tube cell for fertilization, but the extent to which they regulate their own transportation is a long-standing debate. Here we show that Arabidopsis lacking two bHLH transcription factors produces pollen without sperm cells. This abnormal pollen mostly behaves like the wild type and demonstrates that sperm cells are dispensable for normal pollen tube development.

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Figure 1: The drop1− drop2− pollen grains lack sperm cells.
Figure 2: Sperm-less drop1− drop2− mutant pollen tubes grow normally toward the ovule.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F. Tang and Y. Hu (Peking University, China) for technical help in single-cell RNA extraction, library construction and RNA-seq analysis. We are grateful to T. Aoyama and T. Tsuge (Kyoto University, Japan) for suggestions on preparing the manuscript. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant Nos. 31620103903, 31621001 and 31370344) and partially by the 111 project. The Qu laboratory is supported by the Peking-Tsinghua Joint Center for Life Sciences and the Dresselhaus lab by the Collaborative Research Center SFB924. The supplementary materials contain additional data.

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Author notes

  1. Jun Zhang, Qingpei Huang and Sheng Zhong: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Protein and Plant Gene Research, Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences at College of Life Sciences, Peking University, 100871, Beijing, China

    Jun Zhang, Qingpei Huang, Sheng Zhong, Jiaying Huang, Xinyang Guo, Qing Lin, Hongya Gu & Li-Jia Qu

  2. Cell Biology and Plant Biochemistry, Biochemie-Zentrum Regensburg, University of Regensburg, 93053 Regensburg, Germany

    Andrea Bleckmann & Thomas Dresselhaus

  3. The National Plant Gene Research Center (Beijing), 100101, Beijing, China

    Hongya Gu & Li-Jia Qu

  4. The Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, 08854, New Jersey, USA

    Juan Dong

Authors
  1. Jun Zhang
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  2. Qingpei Huang
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  7. Qing Lin
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  8. Hongya Gu
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  10. Thomas Dresselhaus
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  11. Li-Jia Qu
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Contributions

L.-J.Q., H.G., J.D. and T.D. designed the study; Q.L. generated single mutants. J.Z. and Q.H. generated double mutants and, together with S.Z. and A.B., performed phenotypic analysis. Q.H. and J.Z. conducted RNA-seq analysis; Q.H. and J.H. performed bioinformatics analysis. X.G. and S.Z. performed the SIV PT attraction assay. L.-J.Q., J.Z., S.Z., H.G., J.D. and T.D. interpreted the data and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Li-Jia Qu.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1-7, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary References. (PDF 1709 kb)

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Zhang, J., Huang, Q., Zhong, S. et al. Sperm cells are passive cargo of the pollen tube in plant fertilization. Nature Plants 3, 17079 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2017.79

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