Abstract
Plant protoplasts, a proven physiological and versatile cell system, are widely used in high-throughput analysis and functional characterization of genes. Green protoplasts have been successfully used in investigations of plant signal transduction pathways related to hormones, metabolites and environmental challenges. This protocol, adapted from Zhang et al. (2011), describes a procedure for the isolation of rice protoplasts from green tissue and shows an efficient and rapid method for isolation of nuclei form these protoplasts which are commonly used in a variety of experimental procedures including the isolation of high-molecular-weight DNA (Watson and Thompson, 1986), in vitro DNA synthesis (Roman, 1980), isolation of labeled transcripts for differential screening of cDNA libraries (Somssich et al., 1989), preparation of nuclear extracts for in vitro transcription systems (Roberts and Okita, 1991), isolation of nuclear proteins (Harrison et al., 1992) and studies of protein targeting to the nucleus (Hicks and Raikhel, 1993).
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
Procedure
Representative data
Figure 1. Isolation of protoplasts from rice green tissue. A. A representative healthy 12-day-old rice seedling used for protoplast isolation. Black markers indicate the optimal sections of seedlings (stem and sheath) yielding protoplasts. B. Cut strips were digested by enzyme solution (ES). C. Protoplasts collected after the filtration step. D. Image of protoplasts obtained using a Leica digital camera under an Olympus microscope with a 40x objective.
Recipes
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Swiss National Foundation grant (31003A-12293 and 31003A-138339) and the Sino-Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation Program (IZLCZ3 123946 to YP and 2009DFA32040 to QS).
References
If you have any questions/comments about this protocol, you are highly recommended to post here. We will invite the authors of this protocol as well as some of its users to address your questions/comments. To make it easier for them to help you, you are encouraged to post your data including images for the troubleshooting.