As pollen tubes grow through the pistil they are thought to perceive and respond to diverse signals. The tomato pollen-specific receptor kinases LePRK1 and LePRK2 might participate in signaling during pollen tube growth. We previously showed that the extracellular domain of LePRK2 interacts with a pollen protein, LAT52, before but not after pollen germination. To determine whether LePRK2 might ...

Sexual reproduction is a critical process in the life-cycle of plants and very sensitive to environmental perturbations. To better understand the effect of high temperature on plant reproduction, we cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants in continuous mild heat. Under this condition we observed a simultaneous reduction in pollen viability and appearance of anthers with pistil-like stru...

353 INTRODUCTION ................................................................. Historical ...................................................................... 354 Pollen-tube growth in artificial media. 356 Attempts to self-pollinate mutilated pistols. 358 Pollen-tube growth in the pistil.. 359 SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION ...................................................... 362 LITERATURE CI...

The unsolved problem of how the pollen and pistil components of angiosperm self-incompatibility (SI) are inherited has a long history (Lewis, 1960). A recent paper provides evidence, based on transgenic experiments in Solanum chacoense , that a single amino acid difference between proteins encoded by two very similar SI-specifying ( S ) alleles can result in plants that reject the pollen of bot...

Flowering plants have evolved various genetic mechanisms to circumvent the tendency for self-fertilization created by the close proximity of male and female reproductive organs in a bisexual flower. One such mechanism is gametophytic self-incompatibility, which allows the female reproductive organ, the pistil, to distinguish between self pollen and non-self pollen; self pollen is rejected, wher...

We developed a general model of sporophytic self-incompatibility under negative frequency-dependent selection allowing complex patterns of dominance among alleles. We used this model deterministically to investigate the effects on equilibrium allelic frequencies of the number of dominance classes, the number of alleles per dominance class, the asymmetry in dominance expression between pollen an...