Epigenetic aspects of sexual and asexual seed development

In angiosperms, seed development initiates after a double fertilization event in the female gametophyte, in which one male sperm cell fuses to the central cell to form the endosperm and the other to the egg cell to form the embryo. Sexually-derived seed is thus characterized by maternal and paternal contributions to the progeny. Some plant species have the capacity to form seeds asexually, a process known as apomixis. This mode of reproduction is characterized by a bypass of meiotic reduction and the absence of paternal contribution to the embryo, resulting in a seed with an embryo genetically identical to the mother. Little is known about the molecular events that regulate apomictic development. Recent findings show that the apomictic and sexual developmental programs share molecular components, suggesting that apomixis is a deregulated sexual program. Furthermore, the identification of apomictic developmental features in fertilization-independent seed (fis) mutants in the sexual model plant Arabidopsis has also shed light on the molecular events that control sexual seed development, and has opened new questions as to the molecular nature of autonomous seed development. FIS-class genes are homologues of the Polycomb Group (PcG) chromatin remodelling factors conserved in Drosophila and humans, where they have been implicated in gene repression and control of cell fate throughout development, fis phenotypes are affected by DNA methylation, a DNA alteration associated with heterochromatin formation and gene silencing. Thus, the chromatin environment can be manipulated to make certain regions of the genome more or less susceptible to transcription; this form of control, in which gene expression patterns are altered without a change in the DNA sequence itself, is defined as epigenetic regulation. Different aspects of plant development have been shown to be controlled by epigenetic regulation. This review will highlight recent advances in understanding the epigenetic control of seed development. They are discussed in light of a model whereby altered epigenetic mechanisms might lead to complete maternal control of reproductive development as seen in apomixis. © Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.