ARIBIDOPSIS

Bird's-Eye View of Alternative Splicing   A single gene may produce multiple end products or proteins. The process, responsible for creating multiple proteins, is known as Alternative Splicing. If you imagine the structure of a gene as the organization of two types of boxes (exon and intron) arranges alternatively, the single gene product depicts the scenario of taking out "intron boxes" and put "exon boxes" in order. What if when one "exon box" is missed or one "intron box" remained? That doesn't sound like expected output. It suggests the ability of the system to splice out boxes in an alternative manner.  Alternative Splicing in Arabidopsis Alternative splicing event usually occurs in 4 ways: exon skipping/inclusion, alternative 3' splice region, alternative 5' splice region and intron retention. Alternative splicing is a common event in every living system. It provides an amazing opportunity to uncover which type o...

Plants have one unique component as a boundary, known as "cell wall". Alteration of the cell wall or its components demonstrates visible phenotype at the whole plant level. One of the major components of the cell wall is cellulose.   Cellulose-deficient mutant, such as procuste 1-1 ( prc1-1 ), has short hypocotyl containing phenotype. prc1-1 has the defect in cellulose synthase catalytic subunit CESA6. But, it was not known how the short hypocotyl containing phenotype was developmentally coordinated. To understand that when chemical mutagenesis was introduced in the prc1-1 mutant background, 5 intermediate length hypocotyls (hypocotyl was between the wild-type and prc1-1 ) containing plants were picked up. Among these 5, the same gene was mutated into 2 cases. They named that gene THESEUS (THE). Theseus was the Greek mythical founder-hero of Athens and he slaughtered the rogue smith and bandit Procrustes. Here, in Arabidopsis, the short hypocotyl o...