An epigenetic timer regulates the transition from cell division to cell expansion during Arabidopsis petal organogenesis
- PMID: 38442104
- PMCID: PMC10942257
- DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1011203
An epigenetic timer regulates the transition from cell division to cell expansion during Arabidopsis petal organogenesis
Abstract
A number of studies have demonstrated that epigenetic factors regulate plant developmental timing in response to environmental changes. However, we still have an incomplete view of how epigenetic factors can regulate developmental events such as organogenesis, and the transition from cell division to cell expansion, in plants. The small number of cell types and the relatively simple developmental progression required to form the Arabidopsis petal makes it a good model to investigate the molecular mechanisms driving plant organogenesis. In this study, we investigated how the RABBIT EARS (RBE) transcriptional repressor maintains the downregulation of its downstream direct target, TCP5, long after RBE expression dissipates. We showed that RBE recruits the Groucho/Tup1-like corepressor TOPLESS (TPL) to repress TCP5 transcription in petal primordia. This process involves multiple layers of changes such as remodeling of chromatin accessibility, alteration of RNA polymerase activity, and histone modifications, resulting in an epigenetic memory that is maintained through multiple cell divisions. This memory functions to maintain cell divisions during the early phase of petal development, and its attenuation in a cell division-dependent fashion later in development enables the transition from cell division to cell expansion. Overall, this study unveils a novel mechanism by which the memory of an epigenetic state, and its cell-cycle regulated decay, acts as a timer to precisely control organogenesis.
Copyright: © 2024 Huang, Irish. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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