Tag: Root development

Legume plants are renowned for their ability to form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizobia) in specialized root tissues called nodules. This symbiosis enables the conversion of atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a form of nitrogen that plants can readily use for growth. This…

Brassinosteroids are plant hormones that play important roles in cell proliferation and expansion, but it is still unclear exactly what those roles are. Vukasinovic and colleagues show, in Arabidopsis thaliana root cells, that instrinsic brassinosteroid gradients signal anticlinal division. Single-cell…

For more than a hundred years, plant biologists have been fascinated by how plants sense and respond to environments that are spatially and temporally heterogenous.  Many of these responses occur through the remarkable developmental plasticity of plant growth, such as phototropism and photomorphogenesis.…

The precise control of cell division orientation drives plant 3D structure formation, enabling radial and longitudinal growth. The SPL pathway is closely linked to age-related processes in the shoot, driving the vegetative transition from juvenile to adult phases by regulating specific morphological…

For a plant, form is function. Despite the diversity of forms that exist in nature, plant root diversity is notoriously understudied compared to their aerial counterpart. This review by Ramachandran and Ramirez et al. aims to revitalize the field of root form-function research by accentuating the vast…

The vascular cambium, a bifacial stem cell niche, generates xylem on one side and phloem on the other, driving wood formation—the largest reservoir of terrestrial biomass. This developmental system must balance producing two distinct cell types while maintaining a reservoir of stem cells. Key questions…

The endodermal Casparian strip (CS) is a conserved lignin-based barrier in plant roots that seals the endodermal apoplastic space. Most angiosperms possess an additional root cell type, the exodermis, which also forms a barrier. However, its regulation remains poorly understood as this cell type is absent…

Thanks to the continued shedding and renewal of root cap cells, plant roots are able to extend into further reaches within the soil column overcoming physical barriers and potential microbial attacks, or so we assumed. Charura et al. explored the latter hypothesis showing that timely programmed cell…