Scientists have deciphered the mechanism of plant inflorescence for the first time

Inflorescence refers to the arrangement of flowers in plants, and there are approximately thousands of examples of inflorescence in nature. For a long time, scientists thought that the different forms of inflorescence were caused by completely different mechanisms, but a study published online May 24 in the journal Science suggests that the different inflorescence is actually the result of different aspects of the same mechanism.

The researchers describe the mathematical models, molecular genetic mechanisms, and evolutionary processes responsible for the differences in inflorescence. "This latest study presents a unified theory to explain the diversity of inflorescence types found in nature," said Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, a computer scientist at the University of Calgary in Canada and lead author of the paper.

Co-author Lawrence Harder, a biologist at the University of Calgary, says the model's ability to predict the structure of local inflorescences allows scientists to realize that some types of inflorescence are impossible.

The key part of this unified theory is that in the computer mathematical model developed by Prusinkiewicz et al., small changes can produce different inflorescence structures. Since then, another co-author of the paper, British John E. John Innes Centre geneticist Enrico Coen linked Prusinkiewicz's model to actual plant genes to arrive at a unified theory.

The new results will undoubtedly deepen scientists' understanding of the mechanism of plant inflorescence in nature. The paper will be published in the June 8 issue of the journal Science.