Due to the inaccessibility of the egg cell and zygote in angiosperm ovules, little is known about their transcript compositions and about key genes which are expressed early after fertilisation and which are involved in basic developmental processes such as cell division, embryo axis establishment and pattern formation. Based on the technique of microdissecting the wheat embryo sac, egg cells, early zygotes as well as very early embryos are isolated and used for generating cDNA libraries and expressed sequence tags (ESTs). Bioinformatic analysis of generated data revealed that several ESTs derived from the 2-celled proembryo represent novel sequences, not present in any public gene or EST data base containing a total of more than 2 million ESTs from numerous different plant tissues. A set of novel genes, specifically expressed at the onset of wheat embryogenesis, were analysed in detail concerning their expression pattern and their putative role during very early molecular events of plant embryogenesis.

University of Hamburg

Faculty of Biology

Dept. of Plant developmental Biology and Biotechnology (head: Prof. Dr. H. Lörz)

(Junior research group (group leader: Dr. T. Dresselhaus))