From Arabidopsis to rice: pathways in pollen development

The control of male fertility is of vital importance for crop breeding, hybrid generation, and the control of pollen release. Recent development in the analysis of Arabidopsis male sterile mutants has meant that there is a greater understanding of the gene regulatory networks controlling maternal development of the anther and the resultant sporophytes. With the advent of the genome sequence and tools to allow the analysis of gene function, this knowledge base is now extending into the monocot crop rice. This has shown high levels of similarity between the networks of pollen development in Arabidopsis and rice, which will serve as valuable tools to understand and manipulate this developmental pathway further in plants.