Systems Biology for the hormonal control of vascular patterning in plant shoots

Interdisciplinary approaches can help advancing our knowledge on
muticellular organism development, as recent examples in the
literature have shown. These approaches can make use of computational
and theoretical tools borrowed from statistical and nonlinear physics
and of molecular and cell biology techniques. In this talk I will
focus on the interdisciplinary approach we have used to study the
development of the vascular tissue in plant shoots. The plant vascular
system connects distant organs within a plant and provides transport
and support capabilities that are essential for plant growth and
development. In the shoot of Arabidopsis, the vasculature forms a
periodic pattern made of six units on average. I will present our
recent results on how hormones control the periodicity and unit number
of this pattern, with an emphasis on the interplay between analyses of
non-linear pattern formation dynamics and of features and phenotypes
of wild-type and mutant plants.




References:



Ibañes M, Fàbregas N, Chory J, Caño-Delgado AI. Brassinosteroid
signaling and auxin transport are required to establish the periodic
pattern of Arabidopsis shoot vascular bundles. PNAS 106(32):13630-5
(2009).



Fàbregas N, Ibañes M, Caño-Delgado AI. A Systems Biology approach to
dissect the contribution Brassinosteroid and Auxin hormones to
vascular patterning in the shoot of Arabidopsis thaliana. Plant
Signaling& Behaviour (in press).