The 30th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR 2019)

698 / 2019-05-01 16:40:04

Challenges of imaging translational control during meiosis

meiosis,translation,imaging

Plenary track > RNA Biology

Meiosis is essential in sexually reproducing organisms to maintain genome size from one generation to another. Moreover, meiosis is also the driving force for genetic diversity, and hence, also the key for plant breeding. Recent studies in yeast have revealed that translational regulation is important to control protein abundance during meiosis. However, not much is known about meiotic gene regulation through translation in plants such as Arabidopsis and Maize although there are strong indications for pervasive translational control. To gain insights into potential translational regulation during meiosis in plants, we aim to identify the translatomes of dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous species, i.e. Arabidopsis and maize. To visualize the temporal differences between transcription and translation of selected meiotic genes, ASY3 and TAM, we employed the MS2-system to detect the presence of mRNAs and compare it with the accumulation pattern of the respective proteins. While this method, which makes use of bacteriophage coat proteins and highly specific stem-loop RNA binding sequences, has been successfully used in animals, it turned out to be challenging in our hands to study translational regulation during plant meiosis. Here, we present our recent data and discuss the different problems, which appeared during our work.