Abstract
To accomplish fertilization in angiosperms, pollen tube guidance is an essential mechanism. The mechanism precisely guides pollen tubes to embryo sacs in the fertilization process. However, most of molecules including pollen tube attractants have remained unclear for more than a century. Recently, our research group has been identified pollen tube attractants, Torenia fournieri LUREs, derived from the synergid cell. Even though the attractants of T. fournieri have been identified, universality in angiosperms, in vivo functions and molecular evolution of the attractants are still unclear.
Our aim of this study is to identify pollen tube attractants of a model plant Arabidopsis thaliana for which many experimental tool and resources are easily available. We have identified pollen tube attractants in A. thaliana which have the same properties as TfLUREs and shown in vivo function of the attractants (Takeuchi and Higashiyama, the 51st Annual Meeting of JSPP). Here we report our trial to undertake toward further development of study for the attractant using A. thaliana, and discuss gene regulatory network and molecular evolution of the attractants.
