Review
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
A Travel through Landscapes of Seed Dormancy
Version 1
: Received: 24 October 2023 / Approved: 25 October 2023 / Online: 25 October 2023 (06:30:52 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Gianinetti, A. A Travel through Landscapes of Seed Dormancy. Plants 2023, 12, 3963. Gianinetti, A. A Travel through Landscapes of Seed Dormancy. Plants 2023, 12, 3963.
Abstract
Basic features of seed dormancy are illustrated. The seed overall regulatory network governs seed metabolism and development, and it is coordinated by plant hormones. A functional model focused on abscisic acid (ABA), the foremost plant hormone in dormancy, is used as a framework to critically discuss the literature. Gibberellins (GAs) have a main role in germination, and the ABA – GAs balance is a typical feature of the seed state: ABA dominates during dormancy and GAs prevail through germination. Thus, the literature converges toward envisaging the development switch between dormancy and germination as represented by the ABA/GAs ratio. The ABA – GAs antagonism is based on mutual inhibition, a feature of the regulatory network architecture that characterizes development trajectories based on a regulatory circuit with a bistable switch. Properties of such kind of regulatory architecture are introduced step by step, and it is shown that seed development – towards either dormancy or germination – is more properly represented by a tristable regulatory circuit, whose intermediate metastable states ultimately take one or the other development trajectory. Although the ABA/GAs ratio can conveniently represent the state of the seed overall regulatory network along the seed development trajectory, specific (unknown) dormancy factors are required to determine the development trajectory. The development landscape is shown to provide a well-suited representation of seed states travelling along developmental trajectories, particularly when the states are envisioned as regulatory circuits. Looking at seed dormancy in terms of regulatory circuits and development landscapes offers a valuable perspective to improve our understanding of this biological phenomenon.
Keywords
seed dormancy; dormancy cycling; dormancy continuum; functional model; abscisic acid; bistable regulatory circuit; tristable regulatory circuit; development landscape
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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