著者

Akie Shimotohno

出版者

Japanese Society for Plant Biotechnology

雑誌

Plant Biotechnology (ISSN:13424580)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.39, no.1, pp.19-28, 2022-03-25 (Released:2022-03-25)

参考文献数

93

被引用文献数

1 2

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Unlike animals, terrestrial plants are sessile and able to give rise to new organs throughout their lifetime. In the most extreme cases, they can survive for over a thousand years. With such protracted life cycles, plants have evolved sophisticated strategies to adapt to variable environments by coordinating their morphology as well as their growth, and have consequently acquired a high degree of developmental plasticity, which is supported by small groups of long-lived stem cells found in proliferative centers called meristems. Shoot apical meristems (SAMs) contain multipotent stem cells and provide a microenvironment that ensures both a self-renewable reservoir, to produce primordia and sustain growth, and a differentiating population that develops into all of the above-ground organs of land plants. The homeodomain transcription factor WUSCHEL (WUS) is expressed in the organizing center and acts as a master regulator to govern shoot stem cell homeostasis. In this review, I highlight recent advances in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms and signaling networks that underlie SAM maintenance, and discuss how plants utilize WUS to integrate intrinsic and extrinsic cues.