Developmental Plasticity in Plants

Abstract

As sessile organisms, plants are unable to seek out environmental conditions optimal for their growth and development but instead must complete their life cycles in the environment in which they are growing. However, plants are remarkably plastic, such that a single genotype is able to give rise to a wide range of phenotypes. Developmental plasticity has profound implications for plant evolution and ecology and can make important contributions to improving yield stability in agriculture. In this review, we discuss the genetic control mechanisms that underlie plasticity and their implications for plant evolution, using the control of flowering time in Arabidopsis as an example. Furthermore, we consider how rapid improvements in quantitative genetic resources provide opportunities to analyze the molecular mechanisms that regulate developmental plasticity more directly and completely.