Professor Zhong Zhao’s group from the University of Science and Technology of China reveals new signals for the fate determination of plant stem cells

The growth and development of higher organisms, whether animals or plants, depend on the maintenance and continuous division and differentiation of stem cells
.

Unlike animals, most organs of plants are composed of shoot apical meristem (SAM ) and root apical meristem (RAM ) located at the tip of the plant stem after embryo .

Plant stem cells exist in a special microenvironment and are jointly regulated by complex endogenous signals and exogenous signals
.

The negative feedback loop formed between WUSCHE L ( WUS ) and CLAVATA3 ( CLV3 ) genes and the regulation of cytokinin and auxin are currently known to be one of the key mechanisms for maintaining the stability of stem cells

A major bottleneck in stem cell research is that the number of stem cells is very small, which makes it extremely difficult to use omics to analyze in vivo stem cell fate maintenance mechanisms and their regulatory networks .

In order to break through this bottleneck, the researchers constructed a mutant material ( mp clv3 ) in which stem cells are significantly enriched in natural growth while differentiated cells are significantly reduced (Figure 1) .
Transcriptome sequencing (by the mutant stem cell enrichment an RNA-SEQ ), researchers have established the top of a plant shoot meristem high resolution gene expression profile, predicted .

 

Figure 1.

Stem cells are significantly enriched in mp clv3 mutant

 

Through the bioinformatics analysis of the expression profile, the researchers found that under normal growth conditions, a variety of stress-related signals are abundantly enriched in the stem cell microenvironment
.

Further experimental evidence shows that most stem cells and their microenvironment-specific expression genes can respond to a variety of stress and adversity hormones

When plants are subjected to external stress, AGL22, as the central transcription factor for plants to respond to stress in the early stage, on the one hand can initiate the plant's response to stress, on the other hand, it can block plant stem cell differentiation and delay flowering, and regulate the plant's stress conditions.

The development of plasticity below balances the development of plants and the process of stress resistance (Figure 2)

Dr.

Zeng Jian from the University of Science and Technology of China, graduate students Li Xiang and Ge Qiang are the co-first authors of the article, and Professor Zhao Zhong and Associate Professor Tian Zhaoxia are the co-corresponding authors

Link to the paper: https:// class="MsoNormal" > 

 

Figure 2.

AGL 22 integrates endogenous and exogenous signals to regulate the plastic development of plants