Following fertilization, early plant embryos arise through a rapid initial diversification of their component cell types. As a result, this series of coordinated cell divisions rapidly sculpts the embryo’s body plan. The developmental phenomenon in question is orchestrated by a transcriptional activation of the plant genome. However, the underlying cellular differentiation programs have long remained obscured as the plant embryos were hard to isolate. In fact, previous attempts at creating datasets of the plant embryonic differentiation programs were incapable of overcoming two main obstacles: Either the information gathered lacked cell specificity, or the datasets were contaminated with material from surrounding non-embryonic tissues. Now, a team of Ph.D. students from GMI Group Leader Michael Nodine’s lab has developed a method to profile gene expression at the single cell level in Arabidopsis embryos.
Click here for original story, Profiling gene expression in plant embryos, one nucleus at a time
Source: Phys.org