forward (RE:pollen grains and vascular tissue)

[casper vroemen]

Re:

>I'm a student at Duke University taking a class on Experimental
>Development.  We are working on GUS expression in transgenic Arabidopsis
>plants.  We obtained a transgenic line from Sundaresan* at Cold Spring
>Harbor (ET129) that caused GUS expression in vascular tissues and pollen
>grains.  Since ET129 hasn't been sequenced yet, I'm just trying to
>postulate what proteins pollen grains and vascular tissue may have in
>common that would cause this GUS expression.  Do you have any suggestions
>as to what genes might be expressed in both these tissue types?
>
>I'd appreciate any feedback you may have.  Thank you for your time.
>
>Phelana Pang
>       <phelana at acpub.duke.edu>
>
>*Sundaresan, et al. (1995) Patterns of gene action in plant development
>revealed by enhancer trap and gene trap transposable elements.  GENES &
>DEVELOPMENT, 9:1797-1810.

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The ET line from Sundaresan carries a Ds transposon with a minimal 35S
promoter-GUS fusion. In
insertion lines carrying this enhancer trap transposon, I find that more
than 50% of the lines give
GUS-staining in pollen, sometimes only in pollen, sometimes staining in
pollen and in other
organs/tissues. Whether this very high frequency of GUS staining reflects a
very large diversity of
enhancer activity in pollen or is is, as far as I know, not known.

Casper Vroemen
Dept. of Molecular Biology
Wageningen Agricultural University
the Netherlands