Final Report Summary - SYSARC (Systems Biology to understand Plant Architecture) Much of the spectacular advances in developmental biology over the last decades were achieved by genetic dissection of developmental patways, identification of critical regulatory factors, and positioning of these in mostly linear pathways. This has allowed the field to move to a next stage: studying the integration of pathway activities, growth and morphogenesis. In other words: genes shape organisms, but growth also shapes gene activities. Before we understand the development from single cell to multicellular organism, this entangled relationships need to be understood. We have used the model plant Arabidopsis to approach mechanisms of action of tangled developmental networks. We have focused on two pathways that specificy and maintain plant stem cells, and combined experimental biology with computational modeling. Major lessons from our work are that non-linear regulatory networks have great power to steer precise developmental decisions in space and time. The non-intuitive working of such networks can now be understood in greater detail, which should allow us to understand better the 'emergent properties' of developing organisms.
