Cell cycle control and fate determination during male gametogenesis in Arabidopsis Thaliana

Abstract

Development is a process by which muticellular organisms arise from a single cell through cell division and cell differentiation. How cell division and cell differentiation are tightly coordinated during development still remains largely elusive. Pollen is a good model to study cell cycle and cell fate determination because pollen development involves only two cell divisions producing two cell lineages. I used Arabidopsis thaliana pollen to study two essential genes encoding factors in Chromatin Assembly pathway and Retinoblastoma pathway that regulate both chromatin dynamics and cell cycle progression. msi1 mutant slows down the cell cycle, but cell differentiation is not influenced; whereas rbr mutant accelerates the cell cycle and displays cell differentiation defects. I also found that cdka mutant could rescue rbr phenotypes. Based on this finding, I performed a suppressor screen of rbr and obtained several candidates that might be novel cell cycle regulators.