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Flux-Based Transport Enhancement as a Plausible Unifying Mechanism for Auxin Transport in Meristem Development Export

PLoS Comput Biol, Vol. 4, No. 10. (31 October 2008), e1000207.

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Author Summary Plants continuously generate new organs through the activity of populations of stem cells called meristems. The shoot apical meristem (SAM) initiates leaves, flowers, and lateral organs in highly ordered, spiraled, or whorled arrangements via a process called phyllotaxis. Auxin, a plant hormone, plays an essential role in this process. It is actively transported from cell to cell by specific membrane-associated transporters. In the SAM, this coordinated transport creates organized auxin fluxes resulting in hormone accumulation at precise positions, where organ formation is triggered. One key question in this process is to understand how auxin transport is coordinated. To address this issue, we have investigated a specific hypothesis, the canalization hypothesis, whereby every cell senses and attempts to stabilize existing hormone fluxes. Because such a patterning process would require the interaction of hundreds of cells, it is impossible to estimate on a purely intuitive basis whether it would be able to generate the observed organ positions. We, therefore, developed a computational approach to test this hypothesis and showed that a flux-based mechanism is indeed able to generate phyllotactic patterns and is consistent with biological data describing meristem development.


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