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Plant biology

Shattering developments

Nature volume 404, pages 711–713 (2000)Cite this article

Imagine a world without fruits: there would be no apples and oranges, of course, but also no bread, no noodle and rice meals, and (oh my God!) no wine and beer. An improved understanding of the genetic control of fruit development should help us to design better fruits for various purposes. On page 766 of this issue1, Liljegren et al. report advances which provide a starting point to do just that. At the same time, the authors' data give an exciting glimpse of the role of developmental control genes in fruit evolution.

Fruits mediate seed maturation and dispersal, and are derived from flowers. So they are unique to flowering plants, the angiosperms (as opposed to the gymno-sperms, which produce unprotected, or ‘naked’, seeds). The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a tiny weed from the mustard family Brassicaceae, produces dry, dehiscent fruits — that is, they burst open at maturity to release the seeds. Arabidopsis fruits are composed of two valves (carpel walls) separated by a thin structure termed the replum1,2 (see Fig. 1 of the paper on page 767 ). At the valve–replum boundary, a narrow band of cells develops into the dehiscence zone. Late in fruit development, cells in the ‘dehiscence zone’ separate from one another, the valves detach from the replum, and the seeds can disperse.

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Figure 1: MADS-box genes and fruit evolution.

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  1. the Department of Molecular Plant Genetics, Max-Planck-Institute for Breeding Research, Carl-von-Linné-Weg 10, Köln, D-50829, Germany

    Günter Theißen

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  1. Günter Theißen
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Correspondence to Günter Theißen.

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Theißen, G. Shattering developments. Nature 404, 711–713 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35008171

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