Tomato plants harboring the ripening-inhibitor (rin) mutation yield fruits that fail to ripen. Additionally, rin plants display enlarged sepals and loss of inflorescence determinacy. Positional cloning of the rin locus revealed two tandem MADS-box genes (LeMADS-RIN and LeMADS-MC), whose expression patterns suggested roles in fruit ripening and sepal development, respectively. The rin mutation a...

How organs reach their final shape is a central yet unresolved question in developmental biology. Here we investigate whether mechanical cues contribute to this process. We analyze the epidermal cells of the Arabidopsis sepal, focusing on cortical microtubule arrays, which align along maximal tensile stresses and restrict growth in that direction through their indirect impact on the mechanical ...

Ziziphus jujuba Mill. is one of the most important fruit crops and has been cultivated in China for more than 4000 years. Z. jujuba fruit is rich in nutritional and medicinal values. Compared to other wood fruits, Z. jujuba is unique in its flowering and fruiting characteristics. Floral buds differentiation and formation of Z. jujuba is an essential process that affects yield. Z. jujuba ‘Jinsi ...

In complex task domains, such as games, students may exceed their teachers. Such tasks afford diverse means to tradeoff one type of performance for another, combining task elements in novel ways to yield method variations and strategy discoveries that, if mastered, might produce large or small leaps in performance. For the researcher interested in the development of extreme expertise in the wil...

To investigate sepal/petal/lip formation in Oncidium Gower Ramsey, three paleoAPETALA3 genes, O. Gower Ramsey MADS box gene5 (OMADS5; clade 1), OMADS3 (clade 2), and OMADS9 (clade 3), and one PISTILLATA gene, OMADS8, were characterized. The OMADS8 and OMADS3 mRNAs were expressed in all four floral organs as well as in vegetative leaves. The OMADS9 mRNA was only strongly detected in petals and l...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The increase of molecular data and the resulting insights into legume systematics make the search for new morphological characters and a careful re-investigation of already stated characters necessary. Bracteoles are small, reduced leaves borne close to the base of lateral branches. Although they seem unimportant in older buds, they have an ecological function in protecting ...

Many vegetable and oilseed crops belong to Brassica species. The seed production of these crops is hampered often by abnormal floral organs, especially under the conditions of abiotic conditions. However, the molecular reasons for these abnormal floral organs remains poorly understood. Here, we report a novel pistil-like flower mutant of B. rapa. In the flower of this mutant, the four sepals ar...

Flower patterning is determined by a complex molecular network but how this network functions remains to be elucidated. Here, we develop an integrative modeling approach that assembles heterogeneous data into a biologically coherent model to allow predictions to be made and inconsistencies among the data to be found. We use this approach to study the network underlying sepal development in the ...

Boundary formation is crucial for organ development in multicellular eukaryotes. In higher plants, boundaries that separate the organ primordia from their surroundings have relatively low rates of cell proliferation. This cellular feature is regulated by the actions of certain boundary-specifying genes, whose ectopic expression in organs can cause inhibition of organ growth. Here, we show that ...