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Plant Reproduction—Ten Years Later

Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606

bobg{at}ucla.edu

One of my goals as Founding Editor of The Plant Cell was to have a Special Issue published each year that reviewed a major area of plant biology. My idea was that The Plant Cell Special Issues would provide incisive, cutting-edge reviews of timely research areas and would serve as an invaluable educational resource that could be used by students in the lab or in the classroom. The first Special Issue of The Plant Cell, highlighting the area of Plant Reproduction, was published in the summer of 1993, just after my five-year tenure as Editor had ended. Since that time, there have been several Special Issues on topics as diverse as Plant Biochemistry (1995), Plant-Microbe Interactions (1996), Plant Vegetative Development (1997), Plant Cells and Organelles (1999), and Plant Signal Transduction (2002). In addition, a collection of articles on Plant Genomics was published over the period of 1999–2001 and is now an "honorary" Special Issue. I want to thank the Editors who followed me—Brian Larkins (1993–1998), Ralph Quatrano (1998–2003), and Richard Jorgensen (2003–present)—for establishing a decade-long Special Issue tradition that has been a huge success and that has been adopted by our sister journal Plant Physiology.

Ten years ago our knowledge of the mechanisms responsible for programming and guiding plant reproduction was in its infancy. At that time, sequencing a plant genome (or any genome) was a distant dream, microarrays and gene chips had not yet been invented, and the field of genomics as we know it today did not exist. Looking back, it is hard to imagine carrying out an experiment without having the DNA sequences and genomics resources that are available today. As documented in the 1993 Special Issue, we were still in the gene cloning era and most of us were busy cataloging genes and gene expression patterns required for different aspects of plant reproduction. Forward genetics, using either T-DNA or transposon tags, was just beginning to provide a mechanistic insight into the genes and processes that play major roles in plant reproduction—particularly those involved in the formation of floral organs.

Fast forward to the present day and enormous progress has been made in our mechanistic understanding of plant reproduction. The articles contained in this 2004 Special Issue on Plant Reproduction review elegantly the intricate mechanisms and genes that underpin many aspects of plant reproduction and that raise many new questions for future experimentation. I maintained, as much as possible, the topics that were reviewed in 1993. In fact, by reading and comparing the articles published in the 1993 and 2004 Plant Reproduction Special Issues, a thread of scientific history can be followed. This collection of reviews provides a unique "then and now" contrast of how the field of plant reproduction has developed and evolved and how technology advances have allowed major new breakthroughs to occur. I have used this "then and now" format in many of my undergraduate and graduate courses and have found it to be a wonderful teaching tool in allowing students to gain insights into how scientific discoveries are made and fields progress and mature. I hope that many of you will "dig out" your yellowed, dust-covered copies of the 1993 volume, or download the articles from The Plant Cell website, and use these articles side-by-side with those contained within these pages.

The field of plant reproduction is at a crossroads, as is the entire area of plant biology. Reading the articles contained in this volume reveals the remarkable discoveries that are being made in every aspect of plant reproduction—discoveries that have critical applied implications. During the next 50 years we will need to produce more food than in the entire history of humankind. And we will need to do this on an ever-decreasing amount of cultivatable land. Knowledge of the genes and processes controlling plant reproduction—from the control of flowering to seed formation and germination – will be essential if we are going to meet the yield increases that will be necessary to ensure a sustainable and affordable supply of food. Despite the exciting and breathtaking breakthroughs in plant reproduction highlighted in this volume, it is questionable whether these basic discoveries will be translated into higher-yielding crops. We are faced with an ideological force that has been able to "demonize" the field of plant biotechnology, halt the transfer of important traits to the field, and slow down progress essential to maintaining a global food supply. Never before in my 40-year career in working with plants has so much misinformation, propaganda, and politics infected our field. As documented in this volume, plant scientists are making major discoveries about how plants reproduce—discoveries that promise to help sustain the yield increases that have been the norm for the past 100 years through the use of novel science and technology. It is critical for all of us who care deeply about science and the world we live in to roll up our sleeves and educate as many people as possible—students, neighbors, friends, family, colleagues—on all of the exciting applications in plant reproduction that can be of benefit to humankind over the next 50 years. Failure is not an option!

No Special Issue can be produced without the dedication and help of others. I want to thank my close friend of 40 years, Ralph Quatrano, for twisting my arm and bringing me out of editorial retirement to serve as Special Editor of this volume. Ralph played a major role in the establishment of The Plant Cell, having served on my founding Editorial Board and as Editor. This volume is dedicated to his service to The Plant Cell and to the ASPB as a whole. I give my special thanks to John Harada for helping put this Special Issue together, for his invaluable suggestions, and for his many years of dedicated service as a Coeditor for The Plant Cell. I also thank Nan Eckardt, Beth Staehle, and the entire staff of The Plant Cell for their patience with me and for making this volume possible. Nan's incisive comments on each of the articles were particularly useful to me and to the authors. Finally, I want to thank all of the authors that wrote reviews for this Special Issue. Many of you wrote articles for both the 1993 and 2004 volumes and provide a unique connection between these two Special Issues. In fact, Anna Koltunow designed both covers—the one used in 1993 and the one on the front of this issue.

I look forward to reading the 2014 Special Issue on Plant Reproduction on the beach in Malibu and marveling at the exciting discoveries in plant reproduction that answer many of the important questions raised in the articles published here. Hopefully, by then, there will be many new higher-yielding crop varieties growing in fields around the globe that were engineered using knowledge obtained by studying plant reproductive processes.

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