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Updated: Jan 10, 2026

Efficient and Rapid Isolation of Early-stage Embryos from Arabidopsis thaliana Seeds
Published on: June 7, 2013
An antagonistic epigenetic mechanism regulating gene expression in pollen revealed through single-nucleus multiomics
Colette L Picard1, Lucia Ichino1,2, Tyler J Buckley1,2
1Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
None:
Arabidopsis MBD5, MBD6, and MBD7 are CG-specific methyl-readers with opposite functions: MBD5 and MBD6 (MBD5/6) repress methylated loci in pollen vegetative nuclei (VN), while MBD7 prevents transgene silencing, possibly by promoting DNA demethylation. Here we show that loss of MBD7 rescues transcriptional defects at a large subset of MBD5/6-bound loci. Using simultaneous profiling of DNA methylation and transcription in single pollen nuclei, we found that MBD5/6-bound loci that are actively demethylated in immature VN lose additional methylation in mbd5/6, prior to transcriptional derepression. A subset of these loci is also bound by MBD7, correlating with demethylation and transcriptional derepression in mbd5/6 that are both reversed by loss of MBD7. Conversely, ectopically recruiting the MBD7 complex to MBD5/6 targets causes partial demethylation and upregulation. We propose that MBD5/6 maintain silencing in VN in part by preventing the MBD7 complex from enhancing the active demethylation that occurs during VN maturation.
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