Signal transduction regulating meristem development in Arabidopsis. Final report

Research support by DE-FG02-96ER20227 focused on the CLV loci and their regulation of organ formation at the Arabidopsis shoot meristem. Shoot meristem function is central to plant development as all of the above-ground organs and tissues of the plant are derived post-embryonically from the shoot meristem. At the shoot meristem, stem cells are maintained, and progeny cells undergo a switch toward differentiation and organ formation. The CLV loci, represented by three genes CLV1, CLV2 and CLV3 are key regulators of meristem development. Each of the CLV loci encode a putative receptor-mediated signaling component. When this work began, virtually nothing was known about receptor-mediated signaling in plants. Thus, our goal was to both characterize these genes and the proteins they encode as regulators of meristem development, and to investigate how receptor-mediated signaling might function in plants. Our work lead to several major publications that were significant contributions to understanding this system