Chennai: Indian Institute of Science (IISc) researchers have shed light on how ‘simple’ leaves one of the two basic forms of leaves develop in a plant.
Their recent study was published in ‘Nature Plants’. The team included researchers from the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology (MCB) and their collaborators from Shodhaka Life Sciences, Bengaluru.
Plants have either simple or compound leaves, it was noted. A mango tree, for instance, is said to possess simple leaves because they have a single, intact leaf blade.
On the other hand, a gulmohar tree has compound leaves where the leaf blade is dissected into multiple leaflets.
However, both simple and compound leaves start out as rod-like structures budding out from the meristem, the tip of the stem where stem cells are present. How these rod-like structures, referred to as primordia, give rise to simple or compound leaves has been a subject of much investigation in the past years.
The authors have identified in this study two gene families that regulate the development of simple leaves through the proteins they code for, in a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana a popular model organism in plant biology, Bengaluru-based IISc said in a statement.