Plant molecular geneticist Sheila McCormick uses a
vacuum to collect pollen from plants. Click the image for more information
about it.
Read the
magazine
story to find out more.
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Probing
Plants' Pollen Puzzles
By Marcia Wood
August 3, 2004 Those soft, crumbly grains of pollen
that make you sneeze are also--as we all learned in grade school--essential for
fertilizing flowers. Once fertilized, many of these flowers form foods like
plump peaches or crisp apples.
Now, scientists in a team led by Sheila M. McCormick, a plant molecular
geneticist with the Agricultural Research
Service at Albany, Calif., are discovering more about some little-known
aspects of fertilization of our planet's flowering green plants.
In particular, McCormick's team is studying the genes and the products of
those genes--proteins--that may be key players in fertilization. That work may
enable scientists to alter the activity of genes that today block fertilization
of certain wild species with their domesticated cousins. Until such barriers
are overcome, the prized genes that the wild relatives harbor cannot, in many
cases, be easily moved into their cultivated kin.
The sought-after genes might enable tomorrow's plants to thrive with less
fertilizer, less water or perhaps even less pesticide.
Genes cue plants to form proteins called ligands and partner molecules
called receptor kinase, which might be essential to fertilization. Signals
between these molecules may help the growing pollen tube make its way from the
upper part of the flower down to the egg cell at the blossom's base.
In one experiment, McCormick and colleagues used tomato pollen kinases,
discovered in their earlier experiments, as the lures or baits for floral
ligands. That tactic enabled them to identify many potential new ligands.
Read
more about this research in the August issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.
McCormick is with the Plant Gene
Expression Center, which is staffed by scientists from ARS and the
University of California, Berkeley. ARS
is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
chief scientific research agency.
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