Abstract
Fertilisation in the marine brown alga Fucus is a species-specific process involving highly differentiated sperm and eggs. These gametes provide ideal material for studying both the molecular basis of recognition and signalling during fertilisation and the molecular architecture of a natural plant protoplast surface. For the purposes of studying fertilisation the Fucus system has a number of advantages: 1) For most species, large quantities of eggs (106–107) and sperm (1010–1011) can be released from wild plants. 2) Fertilisation is species-specific. 3) The gametes are naked cells, so there is no interference from cell walls. 4) There is a relatively simple bioassay which can be used to measure the percentage of eggs fertilised under controlled conditions. This review will focus on the cell surfaces of the Fucus gametes since we are primarily interested in the organisation of the gamete plasma membranes and the role of cell surface molecules in recognition and fertilisation. After dealing with the morphology of the gametes, the fertilisation assay and effects of a variety of treatments on fertilisation will be discussed briefly, since these aspects have been reviewed previously (Evans et al., 1982; Callow et al., 1985). Recent studies involving the use of monoclonal antibody (MAb) techniques to study the organisation and structure of the gamete cell surfaces will then be described.
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Green, J.R., Jones, J.L., Stafford, C.J., Callow, J.A. (1990). Fertilisation in Fucus: exploring the gamete cell surfaces with monoclonal antibodies. In: Dale, B. (eds) Mechanism of Fertilization: Plants to Humans. NATO ASI Series, vol 45. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83965-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83965-8_14
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