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Plant biology

Floral quartets

Nature volume 409, pages 469–471 (2001)Cite this article

Goethe was right when he proposed that flowers are modified leaves. It seems that four genes involved in plant development must be expressed together to turn leaves into floral organs.

What controls the difference between a plant's floral organs and its leaves? Over 200 years ago Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proposed that the different parts of a plant result from 'metamorphosis' (meaning transformation) of a basic organ, the 'ideal leaf'. But if floral organs are just modified leaves, what are the modifiers? On page 525 of this issue1 Honma and Goto provide the answer in molecular terms.

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Figure 1: Flower structure and the 'quartet model'6 of floral organ specification in Arabidopsis.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Günter Theißen & Heinz Saedler

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  1. Günter Theißen
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  2. Heinz Saedler
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Correspondence to Günter Theißen or Heinz Saedler.

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Theißen, G., Saedler, H. Floral quartets. Nature 409, 469–471 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35054172

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