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Plants often need to bend their organs during their growth and development. It is a complex process, and the different mechanisms involved are discussed in the light of recent findings about genes, signalling, modelling and biomechanics.
This Perspective reviews recent advances in crop transformation technologies that promise to lead to the widespread adoption of genome editing in crop species.
CLE peptides control stem-cell activity in meristems. Recent studies in Marchantia and Arabidopsis support the idea that an ancestral function of CLE peptides was to promote stem cells. After gene duplication in angiosperms, a subset of CLE peptides became stem-cell suppressors.
This Perspective analyses how biological and economic factors determine whether a commercial plant breeder will opt for a hybrid breeding system, and finds that the cost of seed production is a key factor.
