How many ovules are in a flower

No more, no less Exactly two fertile sperm should reach the two cells in each ovule. Armed with these new capabilities, the team, including second author Alexander Leydon, conducted a series of experiments in Arabidopsis plants, a model plant for research.

The most important tool was a pollen mutant the team had discovered called hap2. The mutant grows a pollen tube to an ovule and bursts to release sperm, a normal course of events. It is a convenient dud. The team also employed new techniques that allow pollen tubes and the sperm they carry to fluoresce as green or red. That way they could watch as different tubes interacted with the ovules.

In their first experiment, the team sent in healthy sperm, half of which were carried by red-tagged tubes and half of which by green-tagged tubes. Whole plants that include only male parts or only female parts, like animals, are called dioecious plants. While animal reproduction requires insemination of a female by a male, the corresponding transfer of genetic material in flowering plants in called pollination. Within the petals of a flower are long, narrow structures, much like plants in themselves, called pistils and stamens.

The pistil is the "male" component of the flower, and the stamen is the "female" component. The stamen is usually shorter and folded open at the top. The stamen consists of a stalk, called a filament, that is topped an anther, where the pollen is made. The pistil receives the pollen from the stamen, which grows down the style analogous to the filament in the stamen to the ovary. The ovary contains a number of ovules, each of which contains an egg. Other parts of a flower include sepals and a receptacle.

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