#totipotency

Ever wondered how an entire plant is produced under laboratory conditions in a test tube from any of its parts ? Don't think too much . Here is the answer. Because each and every cell in plant are totipotent. That means any single cell is capable of giving rise to any cell type. More precisely totipotency is the ability of a plant to grow an entire plant from an individual cell. It makes the plants different from animals. This is the main principle behind tissue culture.

All the plants can undergo cellular differentiation if we provide appropriate conditions for them in a laboratory. In animals zygote is the only cell that can undergo differentiation and capable of developing into all the specialized cells that make up the adult animal.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION VISIT : -

                                      Puttering with Transgenic Plants from a three-snippet preview of Tara Rodden Robinson, Genetics for Dummies (2005) (probably from a search involving author:Robinson + “puttering”) : link

another, from a later search, within same volume —

source

Something close to the same text (for this passage) — but not the word “puttering” — appears in the third edition, Tara Rodden Robinson and Lisa Cushman Spock, Genetics for Dummies (2020), which is inexplicably (and without doubt inappropriately) available via archive.org : 318 : link

Here is that passage, minus the OCR confusions —

Plants are really different from animals, but not in the way you may think. Plant cells are totipotent, meaning that practically any plant cell can eventually give rise to every sort of plant tissue: roots, leaves, and seeds. When animal cells differentiate during embryo development, they lose their totipotency forever (but the DNA in every cell retains the potential to be totipotent). For genetic engineers, the totipotency of plant cells reveals vast possibilities for genetic manipulation.       Much of the transgenic revolution in plants has focused on moving genes from one plant to another, from bacteria to plants, or even from animals to plants...

Fertilized egg cells trigger, monitor loss of sperm's epigenetic memory

Scientists from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna, Austria, have discovered how an embryo's genomic integrity is safeguarded during the first 24 h after fertilization. Insights into this mechanism have implications for improving in vitro fertilization.

The events triggered when sperm meets an egg are not only life changing for the parents but deeply fascinating from a scientific point of view, too.

Following fertilization, DNA from the mother's egg cell and the father's sperm cell constitute the genetic blueprint of the single-cell embryo or zygote. The incoming paternal DNA contains modifications that facilitate an "epigenetic memory" of its sperm state. Proteins provided by the fertilized egg act to largely erase this memory in order to generate a totipotent embryo that can give rise to a whole new individual. The mechanisms underlying natural reprogramming to totipotency are remarkably efficient but remain poorly understood. "To put this into perspective, reprogramming to induced pluripotency in cell culture takes several days to weeks whereas reprogramming to totipotency in zygotes occurs in less than 24 h," says Kikuë Tachibana-Konwalski, who devotes her laboratory's research to understanding the molecular secrets of egg cells and zygotes.

Sabrina Ladstätter, Kikuë Tachibana-Konwalski. A Surveillance Mechanism Ensures Repair of DNA Lesions during Zygotic Reprogramming. Cell, 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.11.009

Reprogramming Pluripotent Cells into Totipotent Cells

With the advent of the Nobel Prize-winning research of Shinya Yamanaka, scientists are presently able to reprogram mature, adult cells into pluripotent cells. These “induced pluripotent stem cells” or iPSCs are made by genetically engineering adult cells and culturing them in special conditions. These iPSCs can also be differentiated, potentially, into every cell type in the adult human body. Now…

From pluripotency to totipotency

While it is already possible to obtain in vitro pluripotent cells (ie, cells capable of generating all tissues of an embryo) from any cell type, researchers from Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla’s team have pushed the limits of science even further. They managed to obtain totipotent cells with the same characteristics as those of the earliest embryonic stages and with even more interesting properties. Obtained in collaboration with Juanma Vaquerizas from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine (Münster, Germany), these results are published on 3rd of August in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

In the name of science combine them all and win the Nobel prize for cuteness