Identification and exploration of pollen tube small proteins encoded by pollination-induced transcripts

Pollination is composed of cell-cell communication and complicated signaling cascades that regulate pollen tube growth and guidance toward the ovules for double fertilization, and is critical for successful sexual reproduction. Exploring expression profiles of in vivo grown pollen tubes is important. Nevertheless, it is difficult to obtain accessible pollen tubes for profiling studies in most model plants. By taking advantage of the hollow styles of lily (Lilium longiflorum), in vivo pollen tubes harvested from pollinated styles which had been cut open were used here to study their protein and transcript profiles. Pollination quantitatively and qualitatively altered the total protein composition of elongating pollen tubes. cDNAs generated and amplified from total RNAs of 24 h in vivo grown and 12 h in vitro cultured pollen tubes were used for suppression subtractive hybridization analyses and preparation of home-made array chips. Microarray analyses conducted with different probe sets revealed 16 transcripts specifically present and/or enriched in in vivo pollen tubes. Reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR), in situ hybridization and Northern blotting were applied to validate their unique pollination-induced expression features. Interestingly, several transcripts were simultaneously detected on the stylar transmitting tract epidermis, where in vivo pollen tubes tightly adhered during pollination. Their deduced amino acid sequences showed that most of them encoded small proteins and could be classified into several families. Transient assay revealed filament-like structures decorated by these proteins and one probably localized in the generative cell. These small peptides might be critical for pollen tube growth during pollination, and further exploration of their biological functions and mechanisms of action are of great interest.