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Floral patterning

A LEAFY link from outer space

Nature volume 395, pages 545–547 (1998)Cite this article

The beautiful shape and colour patterns of flowers attract almost everybody, including developmental biologists. Studies of floral patterning have shown that the identity of floral organs is determined by a combinatorial code of homeotic genes, termed A, B and C, expressed in three separate regions of the flower1. This knowledge allows scientists (and biotech companies) to manipulate flowers to form organs at any position, yet the secret of how the three activities are put into the right place remains hidden. But on page 561 of this issue, Parcy et al.2 bring new insights to this matter. They show that the LEAFY (LFY) protein is directly involved in activating the transcription of homeotic genes, together with at least one co-regulator, UNUSUAL FLORAL ORGANS (UFO). The genes that encode these proteins were originally isolated as floricaula and fimbriata in a flower that almost all of us have manipulated as children, the snapdragon3,4.

The LFY gene is a meristem-identity gene — it promotes the formation of floral meristems3,5. The gene product, LFY, is a DNA-binding nuclear protein that is expressed throughout the floral meristem2. Parcy et al. now show that LFY is also able to activate homeotic genes, and that this activity can be uncoupled from its meristem-identity function. These findings were primed by analysis of lfy mutants. Many lfy mutant flowers are transformed into inflorescence meristems, but some flowers eventually form, with abnormalities that suggest differential effects of LFY on the activity of homeotic genes. Parcy et al.2 reasoned that the ability of LFY to activate homeotic genes might be regulated differentially, to allow region-specific expression of these genes. Indeed, they concluded that LFY alone can initiate expression of AP1 in the A region; that it requires an unknown cofactor to activate expression of AG in the C region; and that UFO acts together with LFY to activate AP3 in the B region (Fig. 1).

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Figure 1: Parcy and colleagues’ model2 for B-region patterning by a combination of spatial information from UNUSUAL FLORAL ORGANS (UFO) and flower-meristem specificity from LEAFY (LFY).

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  1. Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Utrecht University, Padualaan 8, 3584, CH Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Ben Scheres

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  1. Ben Scheres
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Scheres, B. A LEAFY link from outer space. Nature 395, 545–547 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/26858

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