Reinoud de Groot

Abstract Plant protoplasts constitute the starting material to induce pluripotent cell masses in vitro competent for tissue regeneration. Dedifferentiation is associated with large-scale chromatin reorganisation and massive transcriptome reprogramming, characterized by stochastic gene expression. How this cellular variability reflects on chromatin organisation in individual cells and what are the factors influencing chromatin transitions during culturing is largely unknown.

Abstract Protoplasts, derived from plant tissues, are considered functional equivalent of animal induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Similarly, to their animal counterparts, plant iPSC show large-scale, chromatin reorganisation, thought to be a hallmark of pluripotency acquisition. To capture in more details the nuclear morphology and chromatin organisation of plant iPSC, we deployed high-throughput imaging and a custom, supervised image analysis protocol extracting over 100 chromatin features.