Shoot gravitropism and organ straightening cooperate to arrive at a mechanically favorable shape in Arabidopsis.

ABSTRACT: Gravitropism is the plant organ bending in response to gravity, while a straightening mechanism prevents bending beyond the gravitropic set-point angle. The promotion and prevention of bending occur simultaneously around the inflorescence stem tip. How these two opposing forces work together and what part of the stem they affect are unknown. To understand the mechanical forces involved, we rotated wild type and organ-straightening-deficient mutant (myosin xif xik) Arabidopsis plants to a horizontal position to initiate bending. The mutant stems started to bend before the wild-type stems, which led us to hypothesize that the force preventing bending was weaker in mutant. We modeled the wild-type and mutant stems as elastic rods, and evaluated two parameters: an organ-angle-dependent gravitr

SUBMITTER: Tsugawa S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10352312 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature