| Description: | Each floral organ is composed of a unique set of tissues. To gain an understanding of how patterning of these tissues occurs during development, we study mutations which affect the final distribution of tissues in the floral organs. To further investigate the nature of these mutations, cell type specific markers are neeed. We propose using Arabidopsis floral mutants to uncover cell type and/or tissue-specific genes expressed in each floral organ. The Arabidopsis homeotic mutants agamous (ag) and apetala2(ap2) result in near reciprocal homeotic transformations of floral organs; in ag, petals and sepals replace stamens and carpels, respectively, and in strong ap2 mutants, carpels replace sepals and petals are absent due to ectopic expression of AG (reviewed in [1]). Thus, the flowers from each mutant will only have two of the four organ types normally found. We propose comparing mRNA expression patterns in the two mutants to detect genes expressed only in sepals and petals, and only in stamens and carpels. These genes may be expressed at any time during the development of the organs, and mRNA isolated from flower clusters containing all of the different developmental stages from each mutant would be used for the microarray pairs. In these comparisons, we would expect to see a lack of expression of certain mRNAs in each mutant sample that would correspond to mRNAs from the missing floral organs. There should be petal and sepal mRNAs present in ag that are not present in ap2 flowers, and carpel and stamen mRNAs in ap2 that are not in ag. Such an approach has been used successfully in a differential display experiment to isolate two carpel specific mRNAs; pi andpi ag mutants were compared [2]. The proposed experiments will not distinguish between sepal and petal specific mRNAs, and stamen and carpel mRNAs, but it will be a first step in finding floral organ/tissue specific mRNAs, and distinguishing between genes expressed in the perianth and reproductive organs. These may be target genes for regulatory organ identity genes, and researchers studying these transcription factors may follow up on the identification of these genes by analysis of their promoter regions, etc. Furthermore, their function may be critical to differentiation of specific tissues, and this may be of interest to researchers in the future. 1. Weigel, D. and Meyerowitz, E. M. (1994) Cell 78, 203-9. 2. Yung MH, Schaffer R, Putterill J (1999) Plant J. 17:203-8. |
NASCArrays Information at The BAR
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