Plants secretly destroy dad's mitochondria before fertilization
Huang X, Fu B, Sun MX
Plant Signaling
The pollen dusting your tomatoes and fruit trees each spring carries a hidden quality-control step that quietly erases the father's cellular power plants, a process that shapes how seedlings turn out and why breeders can predict which parent passes on certain traits.
When plants make pollen, something strange happens: the energy-producing structures called mitochondria that came from the father are deliberately broken down and discarded. Scientists found the tiny cellular mechanism responsible, a process they named micromitophagy, where a protein called ATG5 teams up with another called HSP90.2 to seek out and dismantle those paternal mitochondria. This is why baby plants end up with mitochondria only from the mother, a pattern seen across most plants and animals that had never been fully explained until now.
Key Findings
Discovered micromitophagy, a previously unknown selective autophagy process that eliminates paternal mitochondria in higher plants during sperm cell development
Vacuole-localized protein ATG5 has evolved a new function (neofunctionalization) allowing it to interact with mitochondrion-localized HSP90.2 to drive this targeted elimination
The process is triggered by male germline cell fate determination and is essential for proper maternal mitochondrial inheritance and normal early embryo development
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists discovered a new cellular recycling process in plants called micromitophagy that destroys the father's mitochondria during pollen development, explaining why offspring only inherit mitochondria from the mother plant.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Micromitophagy in plant spermatogenesis.
Mitochondria of embryos in most plants and animals are inherited from the egg cell rather than the sperm cell, a phenomenon known as mitochondrial maternal inheritance. Nevertheless, how plants reg...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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