Meiosis in plants: ten years of gene discovery

Plants have always been at the forefront of genetic and cytogenetic studies, but it was only following the explosion of genomic tools linked to the development of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model, that the first genes involved in plant meiosis were cloned in the late 1990s. Since then, in less than 10 years, close to fifty plant meiotic genes have been functionally characterized, mainly in Arabidopsis but also in rice and maize. In this review, we give an overview of this decade of discovery, with emphasis on the strategies that have been used for meiotic gene identification. We also highlight particularly interesting breakthroughs that these mutant and gene screens made possible.