Flowers of some dicot plants, such as Arabidopsis and Antirrhinum, look very different from those of certain monocot species, such as the grasses – the grasses, for example, do not have sepal- or petal-like structures. So has the transcriptional network that regulates flower development been conserved since monocots and dicots diverged∼150 million years ago? To investigate this, John Doebley and co-workers used insertional mutagenesis to disrupt the zfl1 and zfl2genes in maize, which are homologues of the FLORICAULA (FLO)and LEAFY (LFY) genes in Antirrhinum and Arabidopsis, respectively. FLO and LFY are regulators of the ABC floral organ identity genes, and Doebley and colleagues surprisingly found (see p. 2385) that zfl1 and zfl2 do indeed share conserved roles with these dicot counterparts (despite their evolutionary distance), as zfl1/zfl2 double mutants have disrupted floral organ identity and fail to form normal reproductive...
History of our journals
As our publisher, The Company of Biologists, turns 100 years old, read about Development’s journey and highlights from some its first issues, and explore the history of each of our sister journals: Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open.
Call for papers – Lifelong Development: the Maintenance, Regeneration and Plasticity of Tissues
Development invites you to submit your latest research to our upcoming special issue – Lifelong Development: the Maintenance, Regeneration and Plasticity of Tissues. This issue will be coordinated by Guest Editors Meritxell Huch (Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany) and Mansi Srivastava (Harvard University and Museum of Comparative Zoology, USA), working alongside our team of academic Editors. Submit your articles by 15 May 2025.
A case for broadening our view of mechanism in developmental biology
In this Perspective, B. Duygu Özpolat and colleagues survey researchers on their views on what it takes to infer mechanism in developmental biology. They examine what factors shape our idea of what we mean by ‘mechanism’ and suggest a path forward that embraces a broad outlook on the diversity of studies that advance knowledge in our field.
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