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Female germline development in Arabidopsis thaliana. The developmental process of female gametophyte can be divided into two steps, including megasporogenesis and megagametogenesis, in Arabidopsis. Megasporogenesis starts from a subepidermal cell at the top of the ovule primordium and the differentiates into MMC. After one meiosis, the cell formed four haploid megaspores. Among them, the three megaspores near the micropyle end degenerated rapidly, and only the one remaining megaspore survives, which is then named as the functional megaspore (FM). Functional megaspores undergo mitosis to form syncytia and then undergo cellularization to form a mature female gametophyte with multicellular structure.
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The female germline specification process of a single megaspore mother cell (MMC) of ovule primordium (nucellus) is intriguingly complex because it involves the interaction of different pathways tightly linked with positional information. Various Arabidopsis genes, including the stem cell promoting factor WUSCHEL, have already been shown to be invo...
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Germline development is a key step in sexual reproduction. Sexual plant reproduction begins with the formation of haploid spores by meiosis of megaspore mother cells (MMCs). Although many evidences, directly or indirectly, show that epigenetics plays an important role in MMC specification, how it controls the commitment of the MMC to downstream stages of germline development is still unclear.
Electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA), western blot, immunofluorescence, and chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled with quantitative PCR analyses were performed. Genetic interactions between BZR1 transcription factor family and the SWR1‐SDG2‐ER pathway in the control of female germline development were further studied.
The present findings showed in Arabidopsis that two epigenetic factors, the chromatin remodeling complex SWI2/SNF2‐RELATED 1 (SWR1) and a writer for H3K4me3 histone modification SET DOMAIN GROUP 2 (SDG2), genetically interact with the ERECTA (ER) receptor kinase signaling pathway and regulate female germline development by restricting the MMC cell fate to a single cell in the ovule primordium and ensure that only that single cell undergoes meiosis and subsequent megaspore degeneration. We also showed that SWR1‐SDG2‐ER signaling module regulates female germline development by promoting the protein accumulation of BZR1 transcription factor family on the promoters of primary miRNA processing factors, HYPONASTIC LEAVES 1 (HYL1), DICER‐LIKE 1 (DCL1), and SERRATE (SE) to activate their expression.
Our study elucidated a Gene Regulation Network that provides new insights for understanding how epigenetic factors and receptor kinase signaling pathways function in concert to control female germline development in Arabidopsis.
