It has been suggested that cytokinesis is associated with the determination of pollen aperture pattern. Albert et al. examine the tam (tardy asynchronous meiosis) mutant of Arabidopsis thaliana, which exhibits a switch from a simultaneous cytokinesis (no dyad stage) to a successive one (dyad stage), and find different aperture patterns between two strains. Since the only difference in the unfolding of microsporogenesis is the type of cytokinesis, it demonstrates that the way in which cytokinesis takes place specifies the pollen aperture patterning.
