Workshop on Plant Growth, in Lewes, Delaware, on August 18-21, 1996.

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9602184 Boyer This award provides support for a workshop to evaluate our understanding of how plants enlarge. The enlargement of their structure is one of the most fundamental activities of plants: roots elongate as part of seedling establishment, stems extend and array leaves in the light, reproductive structures enlarge and allow gametes to move and fuse. The central nature of this process has attracted considerable scientific attention. It is agreed from a structural point of view that plants enlarge by producing new cells and enlarging recently produced ones. During new cell production, enlargement occurs as the cells approximately double in size before they divide again. After division, cells that do not re-divide generally continue to enlarge and often become 10 to 15 times as large as they were originally. This, the increase in size of plant organs consists mostly of the enlargement of individual cells particularly after division, and the shape of the organs is determined mostly by the directionality of this enlargement. The rate of enlargement controls how rapidly the plant grows. Despite its central importance, we know little about the mechanisms underlying cell enlargement. The goals for the workshop are to explore how a conceptional framework could be built. Rather than an assessment of all the work in the field, this workshop will be devoted to where productive effort might be placed in the future. In order to stimulate work, the organizer will ask one or two colleagues to join in writing a summary of the workshop. A summary will be published in the Newsletter or The Plant Cell sponsored by the American Society of Plant Physiologists. It is hoped that this would be only a first step toward increasing the interest in how plants enlarge and how the rate is controlled. The long-term goal will be to make predictions of rate and size more easily than is now possible, which will make alternations to plant growth more easily accomplished.