Immunolocalization of meiotic proteins in Brassicaceae: method 1.

Plant meiosis studies have enjoyed a fantastic boom in recent years with the use of Arabidopsis thaliana as an important model species for developmental studies because of its small genome, short life cycle, and large mutant collections. Unlike other eukaryotic models, plant meiosis does not display strict checkpoints and rarely commits to apoptotic processes, which makes it possible to investigate the whole meiotic process (spanning from premeiotic interphase to spore formation) in knockout mutants. In this chapter we describe a protocol for immunolabelling Arabidopsis and Brassica meiotic proteins on robustly spread chromosomes. This protocol allows the detection of a large range of proteins on well-preserved chromosomes and throughout the entire meiotic process.