Auxin production in the endosperm drives seed coat development in Arabidopsis
- Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
Abstract
In flowering plants, seed development is initiated by fusion of the maternal egg and central cells with two paternal sperm cells, leading to the formation of embryo and endosperm, respectively. The fertilization products are surrounded by the maternally derived seed coat, whose development prior to fertilization is blocked by epigenetic regulators belonging to the Polycomb Group (PcG) protein family. Here we show that fertilization of the central cell results in the production of auxin and most likely its export to the maternal tissues, which drives seed coat development by removing PcG function. We furthermore show that mutants for the MADS-box transcription factor AGL62 have impaired transport of auxin from the endosperm to the integuments, which results in seed abortion. We propose that AGL62 regulates auxin transport from the endosperm to the integuments, leading to the removal of the PcG block on seed coat development.
Data availability
-
Expression data of vrn2/- emf2/+ and wild-type ovules and seedsPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE85751).
-
Expression data of agl62/- and wild-type seeds at 30 hrs after pollinationPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE85847).
Article and author information
Author details
Duarte D Figueiredo
Funding
European Research Council
- Claudia Köhler
Vetenskapsrådet
- Claudia Köhler
Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse
- Claudia Köhler
Olle Engkvist Byggmästare Foundation
- Claudia Köhler
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2016, Figueiredo et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 7,311
- views
-
- 1,556
- downloads
-
- 168
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Auxin production in the endosperm drives seed coat development in Arabidopsis
eLife 5:e20542.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20542
