STM
Watch Flowers Spring to Life
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Spring has sprung! The famous Washington cherry blossoms have come and gone, and the tulips and azaleas are in full bloom. In this mesmerizing video, you’ll get a glimpse of the early steps in how some spring flowers bloom.
Floating into view are baby flowers, their cells outlined (red), at the tip of the stem of the mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Stem cells that contain the gene STM (green) huddle in the center of this fast-growing region of the plant stem—these stem cells will later make all of the flower parts.
As the video pans out, slightly older flowers come into view. These contain organs called sepals (red, bumpy outer regions) that will grow into leafy support structures for the flower’s petals.
Movie credits go to Nathanaёl Prunet, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who shot this video while working in the NIH-supported lab of Elliot Meyerowitz at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Prunet used confocal microscopy to display the different ages and stages of the developing flowers, generating a 3D data set of images. He then used software to produce a bird’s-eye view of those images and turned it into a cool movie. The video was one of the winners in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s 2018 BioArt competition.
Beyond being cool, this video shows how a single gene, STM, plays a starring role in plant development. This gene acts like a molecular fountain of youth, keeping cells ever-young until it’s time to grow up and commit to making flowers and other plant parts.
Like humans, most plants begin life as a fertilized cell that divides over and over—first into a multi-cell embryo and then into mature parts, or organs. Because of its ease of use and low cost, Arabidopsis is a favorite model for scientists to learn the basic principles driving tissue growth and regrowth for humans as well as the beautiful plants outside your window. Happy Spring!
Links:
Meyerowitz Lab (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena)
Prunet Lab (University of California, Los Angeles)
The Arabidosis Information Resource (Phoenix Bioinformatics, Fremont, CA)
BioArt Scientific Image and Video Competition (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, Bethesda, MD)
NIH Support: National Institute of General Medical Sciences
