Abstract
During vegetative and embryonic developmental transitions, plant cells are massively reorganized to support the activities that will take place during the subsequent developmental phase. Studying cellular and subcellular changes that occur during these short transitional periods can sometimes present challenges, especially when dealing with Arabidopsis thaliana embryo and seed tissues. As a complementary approach, cellular reprogramming can be used as a tool to study these cellular changes in another, more easily accessible, tissue type. To reprogram cells, genetic manipulation of particular regulatory factors that play critical roles in establishing or repressing the seed developmental program can be used to bring about a change of cell fate. During different developmental phases, vacuoles assume different functions and morphologies to respond to the changing needs of the cell. Lytic vacuoles (LVs) and protein storage vacuoles (PSVs) are the two main vacuole types found in flowering plants such as Arabidopsis. Although both are morphologically distinct and carry out unique functions, they also share some similar activities. As the co-existence of the two vacuole types is short-lived in plant cells, how they replace each other has been a long-standing curiosity. To study the LV to PSV transition, LEAFY COTYLEDON2, a key transcriptional regulator of seed development, was overexpressed in vegetative cells to activate the seed developmental program. At the cellular level, Arabidopsis leaf LVs were observed to convert to PSV-like organelles. This presents the opportunity for further research to elucidate the mechanism of LV to PSV transitions. Overall, this example demonstrates the potential usefulness of cellular reprogramming as a method to study cellular processes that occur during developmental transitions.
Highlights
One of the most dramatic cellular changes that occur over the lifetime of a flowering plant happens during the transition between vegetative and embryonic developmental phases
We have demonstrated that LEC2 overexpression causes Lytic vacuoles (LVs) to transition to protein storage vacuoles (PSVs) and results from overexpression studies with LEAFY COTYLEDON1 (LEC1) (Junker et al, 2012) and FUS3 (Gazzarrini et al, 2004) are suggestive that these transcription factors can bring about a change in vacuole type
Cellular reprogramming may be a useful means of allowing the study of cellular processes that take place during the short transitional period between two developmental programs
Summary
One of the most dramatic cellular changes that occur over the lifetime of a flowering plant happens during the transition between vegetative and embryonic developmental phases. Present in Arabidopsis seeds, is the protein storage vacuole (PSV) which looks nothing like the LV (Figures 1A,B) It is remarkable how such a large organelle (LV) can transform (Zheng and Staehelin, 2011) or be replaced (Hoh et al, 1995) by much smaller and more numerous PSVs and vice versa. Among the many cellular and subcellular changes, the replacement of LVs with PSV-like organelles was most notable In these leaf cells, the large LV is replaced by smaller and more numerous vacuoles that contain SSP aggregates. The question that will need to be addressed is how exactly PSVs replace LVs during LEC2-induced leaf cell reprogramming
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