Altered expression of SELF-PRUNING disrupts homeostasis and facilitates signal delivery to meristems

Cultivating potential: Harnessing plant stem cells for agricultural crop improvement

Meristems are stem cell-containing structures that produce all plant organs and are therefore important targets for crop improvement. Developmental regulators control the balance and rate of cell divisions within the meristem. Altering these regulators impacts meristem architecture and, as a consequence, plant form. In this review, we discuss genes involved in regulating the shoot apical meristem, inflorescence meristem, axillary meristem, root apical meristem, and vascular cambium in plants. We highlight several examples showing how crop breeders have manipulated developmental regulators to modify meristem growth and alter crop traits such as inflorescence size and branching patterns. Plant transformation techniques are another innovation related to plant meristem research because they make crop genome engineering possible. We discuss recent advances on plant transformation made possible by studying genes controlling meristem development. Finally, we conclude with discussions about how meristem research can contribute to crop improvement in the coming decades.

Cotton Meristem Transcriptomes: Constructing an RNA-Seq Pipeline to Explore Crop Architecture Regulation

Plants stem cells, known as meristems, specify all patterns of growth and organ size. Differences in meristem activities contribute to diverse shoot architectures. As many architectural traits, such as branching patterns, flowering time, and fruit size, are yield determinants, meristem regulation is of fundamental importance to crop productivity. Cotton (Gossypium spp.) produces our most prevalent natural fiber that finds its way into products ranging from industrial cellulose, medical supplies, and paper currency, to a broad diversity of textiles, not least of which is our clothing. However, the cotton plant has growth habits that challenge management practices and limit harvest yield and quality. Unraveling and leveraging the genetic networks regulating meristem activities offers the potential to overcome these limitations. We use virus-based technologies in cotton to perturb signals regulating meristem fate and size. In this chapter, we describe our pipeline for altering cotton meristem dynamics and preparing, analyzing, and exploring the transcriptomes from isolated meristems.