The pistil is the specialized plant organ that enables appropriate pollination and ovule fertilization, after which it undergoes growth and differentiation to become a fruit. However, in most species, if ovules are not fertilized around anthesis the pistil irreversibly loses its growth capacity. We used physiological, molecular, and transcriptomic tools to characterize the post-anthesis develop...

Female-sterile mutants are ideal materials for studying pistil development in plants. Here, we identified a female-sterile mutant fsm in Chinese cabbage. This mutant, which exhibited stable inheritance, was derived from Chinese cabbage DH line 'FT' using a combination of isolated microspore culture and ethyl methanesulfonate mutagenesis. Compared with the wild-type line 'FT,' the fsm plants exh...

The phenomenon of pistil abortion widely occurs in Japanese apricot, and imperfect flowers with pistil abortion seriously decrease the yield in production. Although transcriptome analyses have been extensively studied in the past, a systematic study of differential gene expression has not been performed in Japanese apricot. To investigate genes related to the pistil development of Japanese apri...

The first key point to the successful pollination and fertilization in plants is the pollen-pistil interaction, referring to the cellular and molecular levels, which mainly involve the haploid pollen and the diploid pistil. The process is defined as "siphonogamy", which starts from the capture of pollen by the epidermis of stigma and ends up with the fusion of sperm with egg. So far, the studie...

As a group, the flowering plants have remarkably diverse modes of reproduction that run the gamut from clonal propagation to obligate outcrossing. Articles in this volume focus on sexual reproduction, and there is great diversity even within this slice of the reproduction spectrum. Like all diverse systems, reproductive characters are the end results of molecular and genetic mechanisms that gen...

The successful establishment of angiosperms on land is in part determined by their floral design. Because plants cannotmove to find the idealmate, they have developed agreat variety of flowers to provide different mechanisms of pollen release, pollen transfer, and deposition of the pollen from the male to the female sexual organs, the anther and the pistil, respectively. Pollination ensures the...

Compatible and incompatible pollen tubes growing on detached Lilium longiflorum pistils which had been prelabeled with myoinositol-U-(14)C take up a portion of the label and utilize it for biosynthesis of tube wall substance. The label is transferred from pistil to pollen tubes apparently via the secretion products (exudate) of the pistil. The exudate thus appears to have a major nutritional ro...

The occurrence of enzymes associated with bean leaf abscission was investigated in bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) flower reproductive organs in which catabolic cell wall events are essential during anther and pistil development. Cellulase activity was detected in high levels in both pistil and anthers of bean flowers before anthesis. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis followed...

Plant sexual reproduction depends on highly specific interactions between pollen and pistil, the male gametophyte and the female reproductive organ, respectively (1, 2). The pistil is composed of three major structural parts: the stigma, the style, and the ovary. The stigma has a pollen-receptive surface and several underlying secretory cell layers. The style connects the stigma to the basally ...