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Fuel for the road – sugar transport and pollen tube growth

A. Reinders

Published 2016 in Journal of Experimental Botany

ABSTRACT

Pollen tubes require the activity of carbohydrate uptake transporters to sustain their high growth rate. The work of Rottmann and colleagues in this issue (pages 2387–2399) provides evidence that expression of a hexose transporter in pollen tubes may be regulated via the hexokinase signaling pathway. Pollen, the male gametophyte (haploid generation) of flowering plants, is responsible for delivering sperm cells to the egg sac, a process essential for sexual reproduction. Interaction between pollen and stigma (pollination) initiates secretion in the stigma and pollen germination. The pollen tube emerges and grows through the style to the ovaries where it delivers the sperm cells to the ovule to accomplish fertilization (Box 1) (Edlund et al., 2004). In Arabidopsis, the male gametophyte consists of three cells – one vegetative cell that encloses two sperm cells. Despite this seemingly simple system, about half of all Arabidopsis genes are expressed in pollen (Bock et al., 2006). There has been much recent progress in the field of pollen biology, especially in the area of pollen tube guidance and reception by the female gametophyte (reviewed by Kanaoka and Higashiyama, 2015). Pollen tubes have been studied intensively as a model system for tip growth, a process vital in diverse cell types from fungal hyphae to cancer cells (Sanati and Geitmann, 2013). Basic research on pollen biology also has many direct practical applications. The vast majority of the world’s harvest depends upon successful plant reproduction. In many crop plants the male gametophyte is sensitive to environmental stress, such as heat and drought, which can lead to serious crop losses (Zinn et al., 2010). Understanding pollen function is therefore also of important practical interest.

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