Pollen tube tip growth

Pulsating ion fluxes and growth at the pollen tube tip.

Reproduction in higher plants requires the directed growth of pollen tubes in order to transmit sperm cells to the ovules at the base of the style. Many signaling processes have been implicated in polarized pollen tube growth. Here, changes in the concentration of calcium, potassium, hydrogen (pH), and chloride are discussed, as they may all contribute to the process of oscillatory growth and g...

Regulation of pollen tube growth

Ions and Pollen Tube Growth

Ions play a crucial role in the control of pollen tube growth. In this review we focus on four that seem especially important: calcium (Ca2+), protons (H+), potassium (K+), and chloride (Cl–). Ca2+ in the extracellular medium is essential for growth; it forms a steep intracellular tip-focused gradient, and exhibits a prominent extracellular tip-directed Ca2+ influx. pH is also essential for gro...

The actin cytoskeleton and signaling network during pollen tube tip growth.

The organization and dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton play key roles in many aspects of plant cell development. The actin cytoskeleton responds to internal developmental cues and environmental signals and is involved in cell division, subcellular organelle movement, cell polarity and polar cell growth. The tip-growing pollen tubes provide an ideal model system to investigate fundamental mecha...

Pollen tube and root-hair tip growth is disrupted in a mutant of Arabidopsis thaliana.

The expansion of both root hairs and pollen tubes occurs by a process known as tip growth. In this report, an Arabidopsis thaliana mutant (tip1) is described that displays defects in both root-hair and pollen-tube growth. The root hairs of the tip1 mutant plants are shorter than those of the wild-type plants and branched at their base. The tip1 pollen-tube growth defect was identified by the ab...