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Meristems take their cues from organ primordia

Nature Genetics volume 48, pages 704–705 (2016)Cite this article

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Stem cell regulation is critical to the development of all multicellular organisms; in plants, stem cell niches reside in meristems. Two newly identified plant genes establish a novel signaling feedback from the incipient leaf primordia back to the meristem that is required to regulate stem cell proliferation.

New organs develop continuously throughout a plant's life. This iterative, dynamic process at apical meristems requires persistent maintenance of a stable and organogenically active stem cell population, and finely nuanced, bidirectional communication between these meristematic functional domains1. Genetic variation of these feedback circuits may modulate meristem size and consequently alter grain production and fruit size2,3, thus providing target loci for the enhancing yield in crop species. In this issue, an article by David Jackson and colleagues identifies a key regulator of stem cell proliferation in maize that responds to a peptide signal produced in lateral organ primordia4. Je and co-workers used forward genetics and complementation to discover the leucine-rich-repeat (LRR)-receptor-like protein FASCIATED EAR3 (FEA3), whereupon an elegant combination of reverse genetics coupled with peptide assays identified its candidate ligand, the FON2-LIKE CLE PROTEIN1 (ZmFCP1). Furthermore, the authors found that weak fea3 alleles with relaxed restrictions on stem cell proliferation produce larger ears with increased overall yield.

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Figure 1: Primordial signaling regulates meristem size.

Change history

  • 04 July 2016

    In the version of this article initially published, the AtFEA3 expression domain was incorrectly interchanged with the CLE27 expression domain in the right panel of Figure 1. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Josh Strable and Michael J. Scanlon are at the School of Integrative Plant Science, Plant Biology Section, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.,

    Josh Strable & Michael J Scanlon

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Correspondence to Michael J Scanlon.

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Strable, J., Scanlon, M. Meristems take their cues from organ primordia. Nat Genet 48, 704–705 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3601

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