Jiao Yuling's research group and collaborators reveal the mechanism of plant single cell regeneration

Different from higher animals, higher plant cells have high plasticity, and differentiated plant somatic cells can obtain totipotency and regenerate complete fertile plants.

     Plant single cell regeneration has a wide range of applications in agriculture and horticulture, and is a common way of genetic transformation.

    Although many kinds of plants have achieved the regeneration of single differentiated somatic cells and obtained complete plants, the mechanism of plant single cell regeneration is still poorly understood.

 

 

The Jiao Yuling research group of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wang Ying's research group of the School of Life Sciences of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered that WUS and DRN are two necessary transcription factors for the regeneration of Arabidopsis mesophyll cells and can promote regeneration.

      Combining in vivo imaging results, single-cell transcriptome data, and single-cell nuclear transcriptome data, the researchers found that the process of protoplastization accompanied by cell wall digestion increased the random expression of genes at the genome-wide level.

The researchers also found that the degree of chromatin opening increased after protoplastization was associated with increased random gene expression.

     Artificially increasing the degree of chromatin openness can improve the efficiency of protoplast regeneration.

 

 

On this basis, the study proposed a "transcriptome selection" model for single-cell regeneration: the random expression of genes after protoplastization creates the basis for evolution at the single-cell level, and the culture conditions select a combination of gene expression that can be regenerated.

This research provides a new idea for plant single cell regeneration mechanism.

This mechanism may play a role in the induction of mammalian pluripotent stem cells, and also provide a reference for the study of animal somatic cell regeneration.

 

The results of these studies in 2021 Nian 8 Yue 11 published in Science in Advances (DOI: 10.1126 / sciadv.abg8466) magazine.

       The graduate students of Jiao Yuling's research group, Dr.Xu Mengxue and Dr.Du Qingwei, are the co-first authors of the paper.

Researcher Jiao Yuling and Associate Professor Wang Ying of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences are the co-corresponding authors.

The research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.