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UK-Förderung (163.968 £): Pflanzliche Fortpflanzung: Kommunizieren Stempel-miRNAs mit Pollenschläuchen? Ukri01.05.2024 Forschung und Innovation im Vereinigten Königreich, Großbritannien
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Pflanzliche Fortpflanzung: Kommunizieren Stempel-miRNAs mit Pollenschläuchen?
| Zusammenfassung | Fertilisation of higher plants is critical for life on land. It safeguards the next generation of flowering plants and provides food for animals and humans. Here we seek to identify a new molecular mechanism for the communication between pistils and pollen tubes during plant reproduction. Plant reproduction leading to seed set requires species-specific communication between tissues of the pistil, the female reproductive organ with egg-bearing ovules, and the pollen delivering sperm cells to the ovules. However, prezygotic reproduction barriers in most species of flowering plants (including crops) prevent cross fertilisation. This limits breeders to exploit the vast genetic resources of the plant kingdom, and selective interventions that enable a new hybrisation or instigate a new barrier that contain specific traits to an elite crop could offer great potential. Indeed, when pollen lands on a pistil from a different species, this pollen will be rejected during germination or pollen tube growth. How pollen is rejected upon cross pollination remains elusive. To date, protein-protein interactions have been implicated in pollen-pistil communication, leading into searches for ligands and their cognate receptors. Where vast progress has been made in our understanding of the involvement of specific protein-receptor interactions after compatible pollinations, especially during the late stages of pollen tube growth, i.e., their attractance by the ovules in the ovary, a protein-based working mechanism for the rejection of all other foreign pollen species landing on a pistil by accident is still obscure. Deviating from this concept, our working hypothesis here is that pistil-produced miRNAs are essential to control the growth of pollen tubes. Small RNAs (miRNAs) produced from pre-miRNA gene transcripts (MIR genes) are post-transcriptional regulators and active during all developmental processes in plants, including pollen tubes and sperm cells. Furthermore, these target-specific antisense 21-24 nucleotide RNA molecules are involved in the communication between different organisms, such as between viral or fungal pathogens and plants, playing a role in defence. Our hypothesis is based on the concept that post-transcriptional regulation of the pollen tube transcriptome is essential for fertilisation. We propose that the growth of pollen tube 'invaders' is controlled by active miRNA signalling from the pistil, targeting pollen transcripts. Our aim is to test whether pistil-produced miRNAs can be translocated into growing pollen tubes and target the pollen tube transcriptome, using Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) as experimental model. If this pioneering research proves our hypothesis right, these findings will provide a paradigm shift in our knowledge on pollen-pistil communication in flowering plants, contributing a novel mode of communication at the transcript level, essential for plant reproduction. Besides its potential to reveal a new fundamental mechanism of life, this may open new trajectories in the future for plant breeders to generate crop plant varieties with novel traits, that are currently impossible due to interspecies barriers. |
| Kategorie | Research and Innovation |
| Referenz | BB/Y513301/1 |
| Status | Closed |
| Laufzeit von | 01.05.2024 |
| Laufzeit bis | 31.10.2025 |
| Fördersumme | 163.968,00 £ |
| Quelle | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FY513301%2F1 |
Beteiligte Organisationen
| CARDIFF UNIVERSITY |
Die Bekanntmachung bezieht sich auf einen vergangenen Zeitpunkt, und spiegelt nicht notwendigerweise den heutigen Stand wider. Der aktuelle Stand wird auf folgender Seite wiedergegeben: Cardiff University, Cardiff, Großbritannien.
