THE INVOLVEMENT OF ORGANELLES IN PLANT SEXUAL REPRODUCTION: A POST-GENOMIC APPROACH

To study mitochondria and plastid involvement in plant development, particularly in sexual reproduction, we made use of the Arabidospis thaliana T-DNA insertion collection developed in Versailles. Mutants affected in the nuclear genes that encode proteins predicted to be targeted to organelles were identified using two complementary strategies. In the first (forward genetics), mutants chosen for their sterile or gametophytic lethal phenotype were screened for T-DNA insertion in genes encoding mitochondrial or plastid proteins after systematic sequencing of the Flanking Sequence Tag (FST). The second (reverse genetics) enabled us to identify other mutants using the following tools: systematic A. thaliana proteome analysis, bioinformatics software to predict the sub-cellular localization of putative proteins, and the FST sequencing program FlagDB. Preliminary results for the first set of 82 putative mutants are presented and discussed.