While accumulating evidence suggests that gene regulation is highly stochastic, genetic screens successfully uncovered master developmental regulators, questioning the relationship between transcriptional noise and intrinsic robustness of development. Here we use the Arabidopsis Paf1c mutant vip3, which is impaired in several RNA Pol II-dependent transcriptional processes, to identify developmental modules that are more or less resilient to large-scale genetic perturbations. We find that the control of flower termination is not as robust as classically pictured. In Angiosperms, the floral female organs, called carpels, display determinate growth: their development requires the arrest of stem cell maintenance. In vip3 mutant flowers, carpels displayed a highly variable morphology, with different degrees of indeterminacy defects up to wild-type size inflorescence emerging from carpels. This phenotype was associated with a variable expression of two key regulators of flower termination and stem cell maintenance in flowers, WUSCHEL and AGAMOUS. This phenotype was also highly dependent on growth conditions. Altogether, these results highlight the surprisingly plastic nature of stem cell maintenance in plants, and its Paf1c dependence.
Paf1c defects challenge the robustness of flower meristem termination in Arabidopsis thaliana
Equal contributions
Currently Viewing Accepted Manuscript - Newer Version Available
Kateryna Fal, Matthieu Cortes, Mengying Liu, Sam Collaudin, Pradeep Das, Olivier Hamant, Christophe Trehin; Paf1c defects challenge the robustness of flower meristem termination in Arabidopsis thaliana. Development 2019; dev.173377. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.173377
Download citation file:
Advertisement
Call for papers: Uncovering Developmental Diversity
Development invites you to submit your latest research to our upcoming special issue: Uncovering Developmental Diversity. This issue will be coordinated by our academic Editor Cassandra Extavour (Harvard University, USA) alongside two Guest Editors: Liam Dolan (Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, Austria) and Karen Sears (University of California Los Angeles, USA).
Choose Development in 2024
In this Editorial, Development Editor-in-Chief James Briscoe and Executive Editor Katherine Brown explain how you support your community by publishing in Development and how the journal champions serious science, community connections and progressive publishing.
Journal Meeting: From Stem Cells to Human Development
Register now for the 2024 Development Journal Meeting From Stem Cells to Human Development. Early-bird registration deadline: 3 May. Abstract submission deadline: 21 June.
Pluripotency of a founding field: rebranding developmental biology
This collaborative Perspective, the result of a workshop held in 2023, proposes a set of community actions to increase the visibility of the developmental biology field. The authors make recommendations for new funding streams, frameworks for collaborations and mechanisms by which members of the community can promote themselves and their research.
Read & Publish Open Access publishing: what authors say
We have had great feedback from authors who have benefitted from our Read & Publish agreement with their institution and have been able to publish Open Access with us without paying an APC. Read what they had to say.