Millions of times on a spring day there is a dramatic biomolecular tango where the flower is the performer. In this dance, the female pistil leads, the male pollen tubes follow, and at the finish, the tubes explode and die. A new paper in Current Biology describes the genetically prescribed dance steps of the pollen tube and how their expression destines the tube for self-sacrifice, allowing flowering plants to reproduce. In normal pollination, sperm-carrying pollen grains land on the pistil’s tip, or stigma, and grow tubes down its style to reach the ovaries in the ovules at the pistil’s base.… Login to continue

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