Aug 2026· Journal of Experimental Botany· 0 citations
Medicine
TL;DR
This review provides an integrative overview of developmental PCD across vegetative and generative stages, from reproductive development and embryogenesis to vascular differentiation, aerenchyma formation, organ shaping, senescence, and abscission, and summarizes current knowledge of the molecular, cellular, and physiological mechanisms governing dPCD.
Abstract
Programmed cell death (PCD) is a fundamental and tightly regulated process that shapes plant development and ensures adaptive responses to environmental stimuli. This review provides an integrative overview of developmental PCD (dPCD) across vegetative and generative stages, from reproductive development and embryogenesis to vascular differentiation, aerenchyma formation, organ shaping, senescence, and abscission. We summarize current knowledge of the molecular, cellular, and physiological mechanisms governing dPCD, highlighting the coordinated roles of transcription factors, caspase-like proteases, reactive oxygen species, calcium signalling or phytohormones. The review further integrates insights from systematic embryology to illustrate how dPCD contributes to the diversity and stability of developmental patterns. Recent advances in omics technologies, single-cell analyses, live-cell imaging, and genome-editing tools are accelerating the identification of novel regulatory pathways and highlighting previously unrecognized layers of PCD control. Understanding developmental PCD is therefore essential not only for revealing the fundamental principles that govern plant growth and tissue patterning but also for enabling targeted manipulation of cell death pathways, with direct implications for crop improvement, stress resilience, and sustainable agriculture.
Plant regeneration demonstrates the remarkable developmental plasticity of plants, enabling tissue repair, organ formation, and adaptation to environmental challenges through cellular reprogramming and redifferentiation. This capacity underpins numerous horticultural and biotechnological applications, including grafting, micropropagation, somatic embryogenesis, organogenesis, and genetic transformation. While regeneration has traditionally been explained by the coordinated actions of auxin and cytokinin together with key developmental regulators such as WUSCHEL, BABY BOOM, and WUSCHEL-related homeobox genes, recent studies indicate that regeneration is also influenced by stress signaling, metabolic reprogramming, reactive oxygen species, and epigenetic regulation. Among these regulatory components, polyamines have emerged as important modulators of cell division, differentiation, stress responses, and morphogenic competence during in vitro regeneration. Likewise, autophagy, a conserved intracellular recycling pathway, has gained increasing attention for its role in maintaining cellular homeostasis, facilitating metabolic adaptation, and supporting developmental transitions under tissue culture conditions. This review summarizes current knowledge on the independent roles of polyamines and autophagy in plant cell reprogramming and in vitro regeneration, with particular emphasis on wound responses, somatic embryogenesis, and organogenesis. In addition, it highlights common physiological processes through which these pathways may influence regeneration and identifies the limited understanding of their potential relationship as an important direction for future research.
It is reported that NtProRP1, an extracellular protein, localizes to the cell wall immediately after fertilization in Nicotiana tabacum, uncovering a new mechanism for NtProRP1 in regulating early embryogenesis and delivering a unique transcriptomic resource that advances understanding of extracellular signaling in plant embryogenesis.
An Luo, Ying Qiao, Siyuan Li et al.· Plant and Cell Physiology· 0 citations
ERECTA signaling is identified as a local brake on embryonic stomatal cell maturation, discovering another way to push precocious stomatal cell maturation that results in a complex, partially mature cell state that provide insights into the limitations on cell embryonic cell maturation.
Yadhusankar Sasidharan, Vijay Suryavanshi, Pablo González-Suárez et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
Flowering plants are universally adorned with conical epidermal cells on their petals, which play a pivotal role in their function. They modulate the petal microenvironment by regulating wetting and temperature homeostasis and enhance pollinator attraction through tactile signaling. Despite their ecological and physiological significance, the molecular mechanisms that regulate the development of their distinct conical shape remain largely unknown. This review synthesizes recent advances in Arabidopsis thaliana (A. thaliana) research to elucidate the regulatory network governing conical cell morphogenesis. We summarize the recently established live confocal imaging approach for investigating conical cell morphogenesis and the core regulatory pathways elucidated thus far: the spatiotemporal orchestration of the cortical microtubule arrays, governed by the PP2A-KATANIN and ANGUSTIFOLIA-ROS modules. Furthermore, auxin-mediated cell wall acidification also plays a critical role in conical cell morphogenesis. Building upon these established regulatory modules, integrating computational modeling and uncovering new regulatory components in future research will profoundly enhance the value of conical cells as a system for studying plant cell morphogenesis. This will enable researchers to decipher the intricate biochemical signaling mechanisms that act in concert to orchestrate plant cell morphogenesis.
Spatial transcriptomics has transformed plant biology by restoring the spatial context lost in bulk and dissociation-based transcriptomic approaches. This review synthesizes recent progress across diverse plant species and tissues, showing that gene expression is not only cell-type specific but also tightly organized by position within organs and developmental niches. Studies of meristems, vascular tissues, and floral organs reveal spatially segregated developmental programs underlying growth and differentiation; seed and grain analyses uncover compartmentalized programs controlling nutrient transport, dormancy, and embryogenesis; plant-microbe and emerging plant-parasite studies show that symbiosis, immunity, and feeding-site development depend on sharply localized host responses; and work on photosynthesis, drought adaptation, and regeneration demonstrates that metabolic and stress-related processes are likewise spatially patterned. Together, these findings establish spatial gene expression as a fundamental organizing principle of plant development and physiology. At the same time, the plant spatial transcriptomics community faces important limitations, including restricted spatial resolution in standard array-based platforms, reliance on computational deconvolution, uneven taxonomic coverage, limited temporal resolution, and a persistent gap between correlation and causal validation. The next stage of plant spatial transcriptomics will require true single-cell spatial resolution, standardized computational pipelines, spatial multi-omics integration, improved benchmarking across platforms, and functional perturbation of spatially defined regulators. By connecting transcriptomic position to biological function, spatial transcriptomics is poised to move plant science from descriptive atlas-building toward mechanistic and predictive understanding with major implications for crop improvement and resilience.
Yiqing Wang, Zhengzhi Tan, Nicole A Freeman et al.· Plant Communications· 0 citations
Natural de novo shoot organogenesis (DNSO) is the spontaneous regeneration of shoots from wound sites outside the shoot apical region through endogenous developmental programs. This regenerative capacity enables plants to recover from severe tissue damage by re-establishing the shoot-root axis. Here, we review current knowledge about the molecular mechanisms of natural DNSO, focusing on transcriptomic and physiological studies in model plants. Accumulating evidence suggests that natural DNSO proceeds through three sequential phases: (i) early wound responses, characterized by the activation of the WIND1-ESR1 module and the establishment of apical-basal auxin asymmetry; (ii) cellular proliferation driven by metabolic and cell-cycle reprogramming; and (iii) cytokinin-mediated establishment of shoot apical meristem identity. We also discuss how these mechanistic insights have been harnessed for practical applications, including tissue culture-free transformation systems such as the cut-dip-budding (CDB) method, and developmental reprogramming strategies that employ ectopic expression of developmental regulator (DR) genes to induce DNSO in otherwise recalcitrant species. Together, these advances illustrate how understanding natural regeneration can guide the development of simplified, broadly applicable plant transformation technologies.
Hanim Kim, Lin Xu, Pil Joon Seo· Current opinion in plant bio...· 0 citations