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Circadian clocks: Who knows where the time goes

Nature Plants volume 1, Article number: 15172 (2015) Cite this article

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Plants contain several tissue-specific decentralized but communicating ‘clocks’. These control developmental outputs in response to environmental change: the vasculature clock for photoperiodic control of flowering, and the epidermis clock for temperature-dependent elongation.

The responses of many plant processes to environmental conditions are dependent on time of day and coordinated by internal circadian ‘clock(s)’1. In particular, the system of interacting genes that constitute the circadian clock is a major regulator of flowering and growth. The photoperiodic induction of flowering entails expression of florigens such as FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) in the phloem companion cells, and circadian clock activity in those cells is relevant to regulation of flowering2. However, considerable experimental evidence suggests that control of elongation growth resides in the epidermis3. In this issue of Nature Plants Shimizu et al.4 show that circadian clock function in the epidermis, and not in the vasculature, controls the transduction of thermal and photoperiodic signals regulating elongation.

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Figure 1: The Arabidopsis circadian system is a hierarchical multi-oscillator network regulating growth and development.

References

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  1. C. Robertson McClung is in the Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.,

    C. Robertson McClung

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  1. C. Robertson McClung
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Correspondence to C. Robertson McClung.

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McClung, C. Circadian clocks: Who knows where the time goes. Nature Plants 1, 15172 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.172

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.172

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