Fig. 6

Developmental pathways of early embryos (EEs) in the control and line 35S:WOX2i.4. a The developmental pathway of EEs was followed by time-lapse tracking analysis during 15 days. EEs from the control cultures and line 35S:WOX2i.4 were isolated after one week on maturation medium and transferred to fresh maturation medium. Representative images are shown for days 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 15. The embryos followed three developmental pathways: i) normal development; ii) degeneration, in which the cells on the surface layer of the embryonal mass became vacuolated after five days, followed by initiation of new embryogenic tissue after nine days (the areas in the white squares are presented in higher magnification in the inserts; ⇧ arrows denote vacuolated surface layer); iii) development of ball-shaped embryos. The ball-shaped embryos did not develop further after 9 days. Bar, 100 μm. b Frequency of EEs that developed normally (black bars), went through the degeneration pathway (grey bars) or developed into ball-shaped embryos (white bars). The presented frequencies are based on the development of 80–90 embryos (Additional file 9: Table S5). Data are presented as means ± SE of three biological replicates. Asterisks indicate significant differences in the frequency of embryos in each developmental pathway between the control and the transgenic line (one tail t-test, p < 0.05)