Isolation of Guard-cell Enriched Tissue for RNA Extraction

Pirko Jalakas; Dmitry Yarmolinsky; Hannes Kollist; Mikael Brosché

doi:10.21769/BioProtoc.2447

Isolation of Guard-cell Enriched Tissue for RNA Extraction

Bio Protoc. 2017 Aug 5;7(15):e2447. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2447.

Authors

Pirko Jalakas¹, Dmitry Yarmolinsky¹, Hannes Kollist¹, Mikael Brosché^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Technology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
² Division of Plant Biology, Department of Biosciences, Viikki Plant Science Centre, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland*For correspondence: mikael.brosche@helsinki.fi.

Abstract

This is a protocol for isolation of guard cell enriched samples from Arabidopsis thaliana plants for RNA extraction. Leaves are blended in ice-water and filtered through nylon mesh to obtain guard cell enriched fragments. With guard cell enriched samples, gene expression analysis can be done, e.g., comparing different gene expression levels in guard cells versus whole leaf to determine if a gene of interest is predominantly expressed in guard cells. It can also be used to study the effect of treatments or different genetic backgrounds in the regulation of the guard cell expressed genes.

Keywords: Arabidopsis thaliana; Guard cell isolation; RNA.