Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ortiz-Ramírez, Carlos
• Michard, Erwan
• Simon, Alexander A.
• Damineli, Daniel S. C.
• Hernández-Coronado, Marcela
• Becker, Jörg D.
• Feijó, José A.

Titel

GLUTAMATE RECEPTOR-LIKE channels are essential for chemotaxis and reproduction in mosses

Ist Teil von

• Nature (London), 2017-09, Vol.549 (7670), p.91-95

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Mutations in genes that encode GLUTAMTATE RECEPTOR-LIKE (GLR) channels in the moss Physcomitrella patens result in failure of motile sperm to target the female reproductive organs and of zygotes to develop properly. Sex talk in moss Ionotropic glutamate receptors act as cationic channels to mediate neurotransmission in animals. José Feijó and co-workers now describe a role for GLUTAMATE RECEPTOR-LIKE (GLR) channels in an organism lacking a nervous system—a moss. Like animals, this basal land plant has motile sperm that targets the female reproductive organs for fertilization through chemotaxis. The authors find that this process does not occur in the absence of the GLR channels, which seem to be required for the regulation of calcium-mediated signalling and for the expression of a transcription factor that is essential for zygote development. An intriguing question is whether glutamate receptors also function in animal fertilization. Glutamate receptors are well characterized channels that mediate cell-to-cell communication during neurotransmission in animals, but their functional role in organisms without a nervous system remains unclear. In plants, genes of the GLUTAMATE RECEPTOR-LIKE (GLR) family have been implicated in defence against pathogens, reproduction, control of stomata aperture and light signal transduction 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . However, the large number of GLR genes present in angiosperm genomes (20 to 70) 6 has prevented the observation of strong phenotypes in loss-of-function mutants. Here we show that in the basal land plant Physcomitrella patens , mutation of the GLR genes GLR1 and GLR2 causes failure of sperm cells to target the female reproductive organs. In addition, we show that GLR genes encode non-selective Ca 2+ -permeable channels that can regulate cytoplasmic Ca 2+ and are needed to induce the expression of a BELL1-like transcription factor essential for zygote development. Our work reveals functions for GLR channels in sperm chemotaxis and transcriptional regulation. Sperm chemotaxis is essential for fertilization in both animals and early land plants such as bryophytes and pteridophytes. Therefore, our results suggest that ionotropic glutamate receptors may have been conserved throughout plant evolution to mediate cell-to-cell communication during sexual reproduction.