About the Cover
The wild-type pattern of a pea leaf consists of a pair of stipules flanking the leaf petiole and pairs of leaflets and tendrils arranged along the leaf rachis. This pattern is established gradually over a period of about four plastochrons during which the leaf primordium, or marginal blastozone, maintains its capacity for organogenesis. The unifoliata (uni) mutant fails to maintain this capacity for organogenesis, which indicates a role for UNI in maintaining marginal blastozone activity. More complex leaves, such as the afila mutant shown, take longer to establish their final pattern. Instead of determinate leaflets, this mutant develops branching raches bearing tendrils. Mutants with more complex leaves were examined and revealed a correlation between UNI gene expression and blastozone activity. These results led Gourlay et al. to propose that the regulation of UNI gene expression is important to establish compound leaf patterns in pea.
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Copyright © 2007 by the American Society of Plant Biologists
