Pollen wall pattern in Arabidopsis

The pollen wall is a solid and variously sculptured structure. This pattern is determined inside a tetrad. During meiosis, the callose wall is formed outside of the meiocyte/microspore to form a tetrad. Then, primexine is deposited between the callose wall and the microspore plasma membrane which will become undulated. The sporopollenin deposits on top of the undulated membrane and develops into the pollen wall pattern, while the callose wall is gradually degraded. In recent years, much progress has been made in the study of pollen wall pattern formation, at both molecular and genetic levels. In this review, we summarize these achievements mainly in Arabidopsis.