MOLECULAR MECHANISMS OF PLANT FERTILIZATION

MUSCHIETTI, JORGE PROMETEO

Buenos Airs

Conferencia; REUNIÓN CONJUNTA DE SOCIEDADES DE BIOCIENCIAS 2017; 2017

SAIB-SAIC-

synthetized during pollen development. However, thereare reports about some pollen mRNAs that accumulatein dehydrated mature pollen grains but translated onlyafter pollen germinates. Our hypothesis is that they arestored in cytoplasmic granules. We analyzed the cellularlocalization of the SKS14 and AT59 Arabidopsis mRNAs,which are orthologues of the tobacco NTP303 and tomatoLAT59 pollen mRNAs respectively, by artificially labelingthe transcripts with a MS2-GFP chimera. We developeda new MATLAB automated image analysis to identify andquantify the presence of cytoplasmic SKS14 and AT59mRNA granules in mature pollen grains. These mRNAgranules partially co-localized with VCS and DCP1, twoprocessing bodies (PBs) proteins. In addition, we foundthat both VCS and DCP1 are necessary for the formationof SKS14 and AT59 mRNA granules. Finally, we founda temporal correlation between SKS14 protein accumulationand the disappearance of SKS14 mRNA granulesduring pollen germination. These results would contributeon the understanding of how pollen translational regulationtakes place in Arabidopsis thaliana. It remains tobe elucidated whether these results can be extrapolatedto other pollen genes.