Plant sex signal found

Today, more than a century after a German-Polish botanist first described the process of fertilization in flowering plants, scientists have identified an elusive molecular signal critical to that process. The finding, published this week in linkurl:PLoS Biology,;http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000388 sheds light on the evolution of plant fertilization mechanisms and could lead to strategies to overcome species-specific barriers for crossbreeding crops. "This is an exciting paper," said University of California, Davis plant biologist linkurl:Venkatesan Sundaresan;http://www-plb.ucdavis.edu/labs/sundar/ in an email. "They show exactly how [the signal] works by some very elegant experiments," added Sundaresan, who was not involved in the research.

Pollen tube, stained in red Image courtesy of PLoS Biology

When a pollen grain, which contains the male sperm, lands on another plant, it grows a pollen tube into the female reproductive tissues. Eventually, the pollen tube halts and bursts to release two sperm cells, one to fertilize the egg and another...