Role of Polyploidy in Reproductive Organs and Tissues

Abstract

In the older literature on angiosperm morphology many examples of very large cells with giant or “hypertrophied” nuclei within differentiated tissues, including reproductive tissues, have been reported, and the connection between nuclear size and trophic activity of the cell has been stressed (references in Schnarf 1929, Tischler 1944, Maheshwari 1950). Goldstein (1928) even attempted to establish a correlation between nuclear form and functional activities of normal and pathological cells. In the absence of adequate knowledge of the mechanisms responsible for the multiplication of the genome, the large size and the variable form (irregular, crenate, lobate, constricted, furrowed, etc.) of nuclei were generally assumed to result from fusion of nuclei and/or amitosis. The significance of restitutional mitosis as a mechanism of doubling the chromosome number was not realized, and was generally regarded as a pathological process. The situation began to change in the late 1930’s—early 1940’s following the discovery of endomitosis in Homoptera, e.g., the pondskaters of the genus Gerris (Geitler 1939), and the proposition that the tetraploid mitoses “with paired chromosomes” (now called “diplochromosomes”) in poly somatic root tips of Spinacia oleracea are due to a double chromosome reproduction at interphase (Berger 1941). After more than 30 years of research on the nuclear cytology of differentiated tissues, it is now clear that the “supernumerary chromonemal reproduction” at interphase (Lorz 1947), better called “chromosome endoreduplication” (Levan and Hauschka 1953), is the commonest and most widespread process of cell polyploidization in both plants and animals (Brodsky and Uryvaeva 1977, D’Amato 1977 a, Nagl 1978).