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Control of Plant Architecture: The Role of Phyllotaxy and Plastochron

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Abstract

Plants display a wide variety of three dimensional forms, or architectures, that are critical for their survival in competitive environments or, in the case of crops, for their productivity. Architecture is generated after embryogenesis through the activities of shoot apical meristems and root apical meristems. Leaves are the principal lateral organ that determines the plant shoot morphology, and they normally develop in very regular patterns in time and space. The spatial pattern of leaf arrangement is called phyllotaxy, and the temporal pattern is determined by the plastochron, which is the time between successive leaf initiation events. Both programs involve many gene activities as well as the hormones auxin and cytokinin. Apparently, the mechanisms controlling phyllotaxy and plastochron share some regulatory components. In this review, the molecular mechanisms for both patterning programs will be discussed.

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Acknowledgement

We thank Robyn Johnston and Joo-hyuk Park for valuable comments on this manuscript. This work was supported by Korea Research Foundation (C00251). S.-i.Y. and B.-h.L. are thankful for their funding by the Brain Korea 21 Fellowship from the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology and the Sogang University Research Grant of 2008 (200810022.01), respectively. Work in DJ lab on phyllotaxy is supported by the National Science Foundation grant, IOB-0642707.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Life Science, Sogang University, Seoul, 121-742, South Korea

    Byeong-ha Lee & Si-in Yu

  2. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Rd., Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 11724, USA

    David Jackson

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  1. Byeong-ha Lee
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  2. Si-in Yu
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  3. David Jackson
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Correspondence to Byeong-ha Lee.

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Lee, Bh., Yu, Si. & Jackson, D. Control of Plant Architecture: The Role of Phyllotaxy and Plastochron. J. Plant Biol. 52, 277–282 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12374-009-9034-x

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