Antisense perturbation of protein function in living pollen tubes

During the past few years pollen tubes grown in vitro became a popular mode l system for cell biology studies of signal transduction in plant cells. He re we report a simple and fairly inexpensive way of studying protein functi on by transiently perturbing expression of the target gene in living pollen tubes. The ability of antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs) to bind to co mplementary mRNA sequences was used to selectively inhibit gene expression and thus assess the putative function of specific proteins in tip growth. T he delivery of ODNs to growing pollen tubes was accomplished with the help of a liposomal formulation, originally developed for transfection assays in animal cells. The limitations and potentialities of this technique are dis cussed.