Article Synopsis
- Many model plants traditionally exhibit a base-to-tip growth pattern in leaves, known as basipetal growth polarity, which has been widely accepted in research and computational modeling.
- A recent study involving 75 eudicot species found that this growth pattern can vary significantly, with some leaves showing divergent growth polarities or no clear polarity at all.
- This discovery, linked to differences in microRNA-transcription factor expression, raises important questions about the evolutionary origins of these growth patterns and the molecular changes that could have led to their divergence.
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Article Abstract
Most model plants used to study leaf growth share a common developmental mechanism, namely basipetal growth polarity, wherein the distal end differentiates first with progressively more proliferative cells toward the base. Therefore, this base-to-tip growth pattern has served as a paradigm to explain leaf growth and also formed the basis for several computational models. However, our recent report in The Plant Cell on the investigation of leaf growth in 75 eudicot species covering a wide range of eudicot families showed that leaves grow with divergent polarities in the proximo-distal axis or without any obvious polarity. This divergence in growth polarity is linked to the expression divergence of a conserved microRNA-transcription factor module. This study raises several questions on the evolutionary origin of leaf growth pattern, such as 'when and why in evolution did the divergent growth polarities arise?' and 'what were the molecular changes that led to this divergence?'. Here, we discuss a few of these questions in some detail.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4871657 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2015.1126030 | DOI Listing |