Editor's Summary
8 March 2007
How does your garden grow?
Plant shoots are derived from three tissue types — the epidermal, sub-epidermal and inner cell tissue. One of them holds the key to determining the final size of the plant, but the question as to which one has remained controversial for more than a century. Now the targeted expression of brassinosteroid biosynthesis genes in dwarf Arabidopsis plants has provided the answer: it is the epidermis that both drives and restricts shoot growth. Brassinosteroids are plant hormones that are chemically related to cortisol and have a broad spectrum of effects on plant growth.
News and Views: Plant biology: The force from without
It seems that the epidermis is the cell layer through which growth-promoting plant hormones called brassinosteroids exert their effect on cell expansion — a finding that puts a new perspective on classical views of plant growth.
Ben Scheres
doi:10.1038/446151a
Letter: The epidermis both drives and restricts plant shoot growth
Sigal Savaldi-Goldstein, Charles Peto and Joanne Chory
doi:10.1038/nature05618
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (1,608K) | Supplementary information
