Abstract
When asked to provide a picture for the cover of the Flowering Newsletter, I picked this image of an Arabidopsis thaliana inflorescence expressing fluorescent reporters for two key regulators of flower development: APETALA3 (AP3), which promotes petal and stamen identity, and SUPERMAN (SUP), which encodes a transcriptional repressor that defines the boundary between stamens and pistil (Fig. 1). The choice was easy: it was an important breakthrough in my research on the role of SUP in the separation of stamens in whorl 3 and carpels in whorl 4; and among the images of flowers I have taken with a confocal microscope, it is also one my favourites aesthetically. The image won awards at the 2015 Nikon Small World and FASEB BioArt competitions and is published in Prunet et al. (2017).
Highlights
When asked to provide a picture for the cover of the Flowering Newsletter, I picked this image of an Arabidopsis thaliana inflorescence expressing fluorescent reporters for two key regulators of flower development: APETALA3 (AP3), which promotes petal and stamen identity, and SUPERMAN (SUP), which encodes a transcriptional repressor that defines the boundary between stamens and pistil (Fig. 1)
The molecular mechanisms underlying the determination of floral organ identity have been extensively studied over the last three decades, from the description of mutants with floral organ homeosis (Bowman et al, 1989, 1991; Irish and Sussex, 1990) to the characterization of the corresponding genes, most of which encode transcription factors of the MADSbox family (Yanofsky et al, 1990; Jack et al, 1992; Mandel et al, 1992; Goto and Meyerowitz, 1994), and the identification of their targets (Kaufmann et al, 2009, 2010; Wuest et al, 2012; Ó’Maoiléidigh et al, 2013)
Floral organ identity is determined by the combinatorial action of four classes of MADS-box transcription factors [class A, AP1; class B, AP3 and PISTILLATA (PI); class C, AGAMOUS (AG); and class E, SEPALLATAs (SEPs)], which form different protein quartets in each whorl
Summary
When asked to provide a picture for the cover of the Flowering Newsletter, I picked this image of an Arabidopsis thaliana inflorescence expressing fluorescent reporters for two key regulators of flower development: APETALA3 (AP3), which promotes petal and stamen identity, and SUPERMAN (SUP), which encodes a transcriptional repressor that defines the boundary between stamens and pistil (Fig. 1). The choice was easy: it was an important breakthrough in my research on the role of SUP in the separation of stamens in whorl 3 and carpels in whorl 4; and among the images of flowers I have taken with a confocal microscope, it is one my favourites aesthetically.
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