Systems biology flowering in the plant clock field

Abstract

Mol Syst Biol. 2: 60 In the 18th Century, the Swedish botanist Karl von Linne designed a ‘Flower‐Clock’ by arranging a series of various plant species according to the respective time their flowers open or close every day. Watching this ‘Flower‐Clock’, one can then estimate the time of the day by noting the pattern of flower opening and closing. It has been a well‐known fact since Linne's early times that plants can open or close their flowers at a precise time of the day. However, we still do not fully understand the design principles of the molecular network that underlies the cellular circadian clock, which achieves to predict, often with exquisite precision, the cyclic changes in the environment due to the rotation of earth. In two articles currently published in Molecular Systems Biology , Millar and co‐workers (Locke et al , 2006) and Doyle and co‐workers (Zeilinger et al , 2006) propose a plausible design for the plant circadian clock. In previous work, Millar and co‐workers extended an initial ‘one‐loop model’ of the plant circadian clock into a ‘two‐loop model’ (Figure 1) (Locke et al , 2005). In the simple ‘one‐loop model’ (Figure 1 …