Anther-specific carbohydrate supply and restoration of metabolically engineered male sterility

Male-sterile plants are used in hybrid breeding as well as for gene confinement for genetically modified plants in field trials and agricultural production. Apart from naturally occurring mutations leading to male sterility, biotechnology has added new possibilities for obtaining male-sterile plants, although so far only one system is used in practical breeding due to limitations in propagating male-sterile plants without segregations in the next generation or insufficient restoration of fertility when fruits or seeds are to be harvested from the hybrid varieties. Here a novel mechanism of restoration for male sterility is presented that has been achieved by interference with extracellular invertase activity, which is normally specifically expressed in the anthers to supply the developing microspores with carbohydrates. Microspores are symplastically isolated in the locular space of the anthers, and thus an unloading pathway of assimilates via the apoplasmic space is mandatory for proper development of pollen. Antisense repression of the anther-specific cell wall invertase or interference with invertase activity by expressing a proteinacious inhibitor under the control of the anther-specific invertase promoter results in a block during early stages of pollen development, thus causing male sterility without having any pleiotropic effects. Restoration of fertility was successfully achieved by substituting the down-regulated endogenous plant invertase activity by a yeast invertase fused to the N-terminal portion of potato-derived vacuolar protein proteinase II (PiII–ScSuc2), under control of the orthologous anther-specific invertase promoter Nin88 from tobacco. The chimeric fusion PiII–ScSuc2 is known to be N-glycosylated and efficiently secreted from plant cells, leading to its apoplastic location. Furthermore, the Nin88::PiII-ScSuc2 fusion does not show effects on pollen development in the wild-type background. Thus, such plants can be used as paternal parents of a hybrid variety, thereby the introgression of Nin88::PiII-ScSuc2 to the hybrid is obtained and fertility is restored. In order to broaden the applicability of this male sterility/restoration system to other plant species, a phylogenic analysis of plant invertases(β-fructofuranosidases) and related genes of different species was carried out. This reveals a specific clustering of the cell wall invertases with anther-specific expression for dicotyl species and another cluster for monocotyl plants. Thus, in both groups of plants, there seems to be a kind of co-evolution, but no recent common ancestor of these members of the gene family. These findings provide a helpful orientation to classify corresponding candidate genes in further plant species, in addition to the species analysed so far (Arabidopsis, tobacco, tomato, potato, carrots, rice, and wheat).