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Wood Formation in Trees Is Increased by Manipulating PXY-Regulated Cell Division

Etchells, J. Peter; Mishra, Laxmi S.; Kumar, Manoj; Campbell, Liam; Turner, Simon R.

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Authors

Laxmi S. Mishra

Manoj Kumar

Liam Campbell

Simon R. Turner



Abstract

The woody tissue of trees is composed of xylem cells that arise from divisions of stem cells within the cambial meristem. The rate of xylem cell formation is dependent upon the rate of cell division within the cambium and is controlled by both genetic and environmental factors [1 and 2]. In the annual plant Arabidopsis, signaling between a peptide ligand CLE41 and a receptor kinase PXY controls cambial cell divisions [ 3, 4 and 5]; however, the pathway regulating secondary growth in trees has not been identified. Here, we show that an aspen receptor kinase PttPXY and its peptide ligand PttCLE41 are functional orthologs and act to control a multifunctional pathway that regulates both the rate of cambial cell division and woody tissue organization. Ectopic overexpression of PttPXY and PttCLE41 genes in hybrid aspen resulted in vascular tissue abnormalities and poor plant growth. In contrast, precise tissue-specific overexpression generated trees that exhibited a 2-fold increase in the rate of wood formation, were taller, and possessed larger leaves compared to the controls. Our results demonstrate that the PXY-CLE pathway has evolved to regulate secondary growth and manipulating this pathway can result in dramatically increased tree growth and productivity.

Citation

Etchells, J. P., Mishra, L. S., Kumar, M., Campbell, L., & Turner, S. R. (2015). Wood Formation in Trees Is Increased by Manipulating PXY-Regulated Cell Division. Current Biology, 25(8), 1050-1055. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.02.023

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 5, 2015
Online Publication Date Apr 9, 2015
Publication Date Apr 20, 2015
Deposit Date Jul 20, 2015
Publicly Available Date Jul 27, 2015
Journal Current Biology
Print ISSN 0960-9822
Publisher Cell Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 25
Issue 8
Pages 1050-1055
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.02.023
Related Public URLs https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:258870

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
You may copy and distribute the article, create extracts, abstracts and new works from the article, alter and revise the article, text or data mine the article and otherwise reuse the article commercially (including reuse and/or resale of the article) without permission from Elsevier. You must give appropriate credit to the original work, together with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI and a link to the Creative Commons user license above. You must indicate if any changes are made but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use of the work.




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