An epidermis-driven mechanism positions and scales stem cell niches in plants
Abstract
How molecular patterning scales to organ size is highly debated in developmental biology. We explore this question for the characteristic gene expression domains of the plant stem cell niche residing in the shoot apical meristem. We show that a combination of signals originating from the epidermal cell layer can correctly pattern the key gene expression domains and notably leads to adaptive scaling of these domains to the size of the tissue. Using live imaging, we experimentally confirm this prediction. The identified mechanism is also sufficient to explain de novo stem cell niches in emerging flowers. Our findings suggest that the deformation of the tissue transposes meristem geometry into an instructive scaling and positional input for the apical plant stem cell niche.
Additional Information
Copyright © 2016, The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. Submitted 24 July 2015. Accepted 30 November 2015. Published 29 January 2016. We thank L. Guignard, G. Malandain, and C. Godin for their help in using MARS for the meristem segmentation. We also thank J. Locke for comments on the manuscript. Funding: This work was funded by grants from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (GAT3395/PR4) and the Swedish Research Council (VR2013-4632) to H.J. and by Gatsby Charitable Foundation grants GAT3272/C and GAT3273-PR1, the U.S. NIH (R01 GM104244), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF3406) (to E.M.M.). Author contributions: J.G. designed the study, performed modeling, collected and analyzed data, and prepared the manuscript. B.L. and P.T. equally contributed in collecting and analyzing data. C.S., Y.R., and A.S. collected and analyzed data. C.S. commented on the manuscript. O.H. and E.M.M. contributed in designing the study and commented on the manuscript. H.J. designed the study and prepared the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the corresponding author.Attached Files
Published - e1500989.full.pdf
Supplemental Material - 26/2.1.e1500989.DC1/1500989_Movie_S1.zip
Supplemental Material - 26/2.1.e1500989.DC1/1500989_SM.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC4846443
- Eprint ID
- 61061
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20151013-132146207
- GAT3395/PR4
- Gatsby Charitable Foundation
- VR2013-4632
- Swedish Research Council
- GAT3272/C
- Gatsby Charitable Foundation
- GAT3273-PR1
- Gatsby Charitable Foundation
- R01 GM104244
- NIH
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
- GBMF3406
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- Created
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2016-02-04Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-05-12Created from EPrint's last_modified field