Skip to main content
The Plant Cell logoLink to The Plant Cell
. 1991 Aug;3(8):759–769. doi: 10.1105/tpc.3.8.759

Modifications of Mitochondrial DNA Cause Changes in Floral Development in Homeotic-like Mutants of Tobacco.

W Kofer 1, K Glimelius 1, HT Bonnett 1
PMCID: PMC160043  PMID: 12324612

Abstract

To investigate the influence of mitochondrial genes on stamen development of higher plants, protoplasts from three different, male-sterile tobacco cultivars were fused. The fused cells were cultured individually into calli, from which plants were regenerated. Cybrid plants were obtained that exhibited flowers with recombined biparental male-sterile morphology and with novel male-sterile stamens that differed from any types from sexual or somatic hybridizations described previously. The male-sterile morphologies of these cybrids and their parents support the hypothesis that nuclear-mitochondrial interaction occurs at several stages in tobacco floral development and that several mitochondrial genes are necessary for normal stamen and corolla development. Analysis by restriction endonuclease digestion of mitochondrial DNA of male-sterile cybrids and their parents revealed that the mitochondrial DNA of male-sterile cybrids with parental floral morphology was unchanged when compared with parental mitochondrial DNA. Cybrids that were morphologically similar to one parent's male-sterile phenotype had mitochondrial DNA almost identical to that parent, whereas cybrids with recombined biparental or novel male-sterile phenotypes contained mitochondrial DNA different from both male-sterile parents and from each other. A set of mitochondrial DNA fragments could be correlated with split corollas, a feature found in several tobacco male-sterile cultivars. DNA gel blot analysis using a number of mitochondrial genes confirmed the conclusions based on ethidium bromide staining of mitochondrial DNA restriction digests.

Full Text

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (3.0 MB).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Dewey R. E., Levings C. S., 3rd, Timothy D. H. Novel recombinations in the maize mitochondrial genome produce a unique transcriptional unit in the Texas male-sterile cytoplasm. Cell. 1986 Feb 14;44(3):439–449. doi: 10.1016/0092-8674(86)90465-4. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Prinzen F. W., van der Vusse G. J., Reneman R. S. Blood flow distribution in the left ventricular free wall in open-chest dogs. Basic Res Cardiol. 1981 Jul-Aug;76(4):431–437. doi: 10.1007/BF01908337. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from The Plant Cell are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

RESOURCES