title: Fluorescence activated cell sorting of shoot apical meristem cell types.
abstract: Growing tips of plants harbor a set of stem cells in structures called shoot apical meristems (SAMs) which provide cells for development of aboveground biomass. Despite a periodic differentiation of stem cell progenitors into leaves, the stem cell pool remains constant over time. Genetic analysis has revealed molecular pathways involved in stem-cell specification, cell division patterns, and organ differentiation. Stem cells within SAMs are few in number, which imposes a limitation to the experimental approaches that can be used for deciphering the gene regulatory networks that underlie cell fate transitions. Here, I provide detailed experimental protocols for the protoplasting and subsequent purification through cell sorting of SAM cells, which allows genome-wide analyses of gene expression patterns at a single cell-type resolution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, Center for Plant Cell Biology, Institute of Integrative Genome Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA, venug@ucr.edu.
authors.forename: G Venugopala
authors.initials: GV
authors.lastname: Reddy
mesh_terms: D017360:Arabidopsis / Q000166:cytology; D005434:Flow Cytometry / Q000379:methods*; D018519:Meristem / Q000166:cytology*; D011523:Protoplasts / Q000166:cytology; D018749:RNA, Plant / Q000302:isolation & purification; D013234:Stem Cells / Q000166:cytology*
chemical_list: D018749:RNA, Plant