Abstract
The production of seed in flowering plants is complicated by the need to first invest in reproductive shoots, inflorescences, flowers, and fruit. Furthermore, in many species, it will be months between plants generating flowers and setting seed. How can plants therefore produce an optimal seed-set relative to environmental resources when the "reproductive architecture" that supports seed-set needs to be elaborated so far in advance? Here, we address this question by investigating the spatio-temporal control of reproductive architecture in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and Brassica napus. We show that resource and resource-related signals such as substrate volume play a key role in determining the scale of reproductive effort, and that this is reflected in the earliest events in reproductive development, which broadly predict the subsequent reproductive effort. We show that a series of negative feedbacks both within and between developmental stages prevent plants from over-committing to early stages of development. These feedbacks create a highly plastic, homeostatic system in which additional organs can be produced in the case of reproductive failure elsewhere in the system. We propose that these feedbacks represent an "integrated dominance" mechanism that allows resource use to be correctly sequenced between developmental stages to optimize seed set.
Highlights
In flowering plants, the vegetative phase of the lifecycle is optimized for harvesting resources from the environment; in the shoot system, the primary concern is the capture of photosynthetically active solar radiation
The scale of reproductive effort is predicted by early developmental decisions To understand how reproductive architecture is controlled in Arabidopsis, we began by compiling an extensive dataset of reproductive architecture measurements from wild-type Arabidopsis (Col-0) from experiments across the past 18 years
For a number of these experiments, we had recorded the total number of inflorescences, and for a smaller number, the total number of fruits in addition (17 experiments; Supplemental Figure S1C)
Summary
The vegetative phase of the lifecycle is optimized for harvesting resources from the environment; in the shoot system, the primary concern is the capture of photosynthetically active solar radiation. The vegetative shoot architecture (i.e. the spatio-temporal arrangement of organs) of flowering plants tends to consist of a simple, iterative pattern of development. The reproductive shoot architecture of flowering plants is optimized to increase reproductive success, utilizing the resources acquired during the vegetative phase. Reproductive architecture is driven and constrained by fundamentally different factors to vegetative architecture. The acquisition of resources, while still beneficial, is less important than servicing the reproductive strategy of Received January 15, 2021.
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