Recommend Plant Signaling & Behavior (PS&B) to your librarian for 2008. Download form here.

PS&B is the official journal of the Society for Plant Neurobiology. Full membership ($60 annually) and student membership ($30 annually) include online access to the journal. Click here to join.

Email this page

Print this page

Article Addendum

Deciphering the Possible Mechanism of GABA in Tobacco Pollen Tube Growth and Guidance

Guang-Hui Yu and Meng-Xiang Sun

volume 2 | issue 5

september/october
Pages: 393 - 395

We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:

Download PDF

If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.

γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is an inhibitory transmitter in animal central and peripheral nervous systems, and also plays an important role in pollen tube growth and guidance. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects in plants are poorly understood, mainly because the GABA receptor in plants has not been elucidated. To address this issue, we recently created quantum dot probes to identify possible GABA receptors on the membrane surfaces of pollen protoplasts. We found that GABA bound to cell membranes and regulated downstream Ca²⁺ oscillation in the cells. These results provide important clues to further specifying the nature of the binding sites and deciphering the role of GABA as a signal molecule in pollen tube growth and orientation.

Authors

Guang-Hui Yu

South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, China

Meng-Xiang Sun