Arabidopsis thaliana Transcriptome or Gene expression

In flowering plants, single-celled, highly polarized, pollen tubes deliver sperm to female gametes by tip-growth through complex pistil tissue. Interactions between the pollen tube and pistil cells promote conspecific fertilization and block interspecific fertilization; the molecular nature of these interactions are not well described. MYB97, MYB101, and MYB120 are Arabidopsis pollen tube transcription factors induced by growth through the pistil and are required for sperm-release, a pre-zygotic barrier to interspecific hybridization. To define male and female-expressed genes that require MYB activity for their expression during pollination, we developed a method for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-informed RNA-seq analysis that unambiguously defines pollen and pistil gene expression in myb triple mutant and wild-type pollinations between the polymorphic Cvi-0 and Col-0 accessions. We defined the relative contributions of the pollen tube and the pistil to the pollination transcriptome and defined patterns of pollen tube gene expression controlled by pollen tube MYBs.