Active suppression of a leaf meristem orchestrates determinate leaf growth

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Leaves are flat determinate organs derived from indeterminate shoot apical meristems. The presence of a specific leaf meristem is debated, as anatomical features typical of meristems are not present in leaves. Here we demonstrate that multiple NGATHA (NGA) and CINCINNATA-class-TCP (CIN-TCP) transcription factors act redundantly, shortly after leaf initiation, to gradually restrict the activity of a leaf meristem in Arabidopsis thaliana to marginal and basal domains, and that their absence confers persistent marginal growth to leaves, cotyledons and floral organs. The marginal restriction of the broadly acting leaf meristem following primordia initiation, is mediated by the juxtaposition of adaxial and abaxial domains and maintained by WOX homeobox transcription factors, whereas other marginal elaboration genes are dispensable for its maintenance. This genetic framework parallels the morphogenetic program of shoot apical meristems and may represent a relic of an ancestral shoot system from which seed plant leaves evolved.

Data availability

The following data sets were generated

(2016) Leaf margins of indeterminate Arabidopsis leaves
Publicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE78693).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?token=gvyvwwcmtxmrtit&acc=GSE78693

Article and author information

Author details

John Paul Alvarez

School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Chihiro Furumizu

School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Idan Efroni

School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Yuval Eshed

School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
John L Bowman

School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

For correspondence
John.Bowman@monash.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7347-3691

Funding

Australian Research Council (DP110100070, DP130100177, DP160100892)

John Paul Alvarez
Chihiro Furumizu
John L Bowman

Israel Science Foundation (863-06)

John Paul Alvarez
Yuval Eshed

European Molecular Biology Organization (185-2010)

Idan Efroni

United States - Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (3767-05)

John Paul Alvarez
Yuval Eshed
John L Bowman

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.