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We investigated the anatomical and ultrastructural features of transgenic tobacco plants that overexpressed a gene of histone H1 from Arabidopsis thaliana. The overexpression of the heterologous gene resulted in more than a 2.5-fold increase over the physiological level of the histone H1:DNA ratio in chromatin. H1-overexpressing plants had a distinct mutant phenotype characterized by dwarf appearance and severely hampered flowering. These changes were accompanied by extensive and unusual heterochromatinization of nuclei occurring in all leaf parenchymal cells but not in leaf epidermal cells. The observed anomalies in the growth rate and size of the cells and in nuclei/chloroplast proportions in histone H1-overexpressing plants suggest that the H1:DNA ratio can influence some specialized cellular functions involving the cytoskeleton, and nuclear/organellar interactions which are of importance for the normal development of a plant.
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Joanna Ślusarczyk (1999) studied this question.
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