A single-cell analysis of the Arabidopsis vegetative shoot apex
- Journal:
- Developmental Cell
- Published:
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.devcel.2021.02.021
- Affiliations:
- 3
- Authors:
- 3
Research Highlight
A transcriptomic atlas of plant shoot tips
© Ed Reschke/Stone/Getty Images
A map of the transcriptional activity in the growing tips of plant shoots at a single-cell resolution is now available.
One of the mysteries of plant development is how stem cells in the shoot apex give rise to all the different parts of a plant that appear above ground. Single-cell RNA sequencing is a powerful technology for shedding light on this, but it is hard to apply to the shoot apex because of its small size.
Now, a researcher from ShanghaiTech University and two collaborators have harvested shoot tips from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and performed single-cell RNA sequencing on the processed tissues.
The analysis revealed several clusters of cell types in the developing shoot. The researchers characterized changes in gene expression in these clusters over time to track genetic regulatory networks and monitor changes in cell-cycle genes.
The results provide a valuable resource for plant scientists to interrogate the genetic regulation of differentiation in the shoot tip.
References
- Developmental Cell 56, 1056–1074 (2021). doi: 10.1016/j.devcel.2021.02.021
| Institutions | Authors | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), CAS, China | 0.67 | |
| University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Shanghai, China | 0.17 | |
| ShanghaiTech University, China | 0.17 |