Background

Pollen is a critical stage during the life cycle of sexually-reproducing plants. Pollen germination and subsequent tube growth provide the passage for two non-motile sperm cells to effect double fertilization in flowering plants. Pollen is routinely used as a model system to addressing fundamental cell biological questions, such as the establishment and maintenance of cell polarity and polar cell growth, as well as the structure and function of the actin cytoskeleton (Chen et al., 2009; Qu et al., 2015). Generally, pollen derived from lily and tobacco was widely used due to the large size of the grains, which makes them easy to collect and observe under the microscope. In contrast, Arabidopsis pollen is small and it is relatively difficult to collect a large amount of pollen to isolate a sufficient quantity of protein for downstream analyses such as Western blotting and mass spectrometry. Therefore, development of a protocol to rapidly isolate total protein from Arabidopsis pollen will facilitate related analyses.