Control of dissected leaf form in the Arabidopsis thaliana relative Cardamine hirsuta

生物学中的一个关键问题是了解不同的有机体如何具有不同的形式。在植物中，这种形态上的变化在公园散步时看到的许多不同的叶子形状中是显而易见的。叶也是值得研究的，因为它们在食物链中起着关键作用，是陆地植物的主要光合器官，因此负责陆地生态系统中的CO2固定。由于这些原因，了解叶的多样性是如何产生的是科学家相当感兴趣的。为了研究这个问题，我们研究了多毛碎米荠（Cardamine hirsuta），它是一种叶子完全细分为小叶的植物。小叶的存在使得这种植物与它的近亲塔勒水芹（拟南芥）非常不同，水芹有完整的不裂叶。我们已经知道了很多关于整个叶子形状是如何在拟南芥中产生的，因为它很容易种植和做实验。在实验室里，毛水芹也很容易处理，所以我们将用它来了解小叶是如何产生的，是什么控制了它们的数量，以及为什么这种植物会产生小叶，而它的亲戚塔勒水芹却不会。

A key problem in biology is to understand how different organisms come to have different forms. In plants this variation in form is obvious in the many different leaf shapes one sees during a walk in the park. Leaves are also interesting to study because they play a key role in the food chain being the main photosynthetic organs of land plants and thus responsible for CO2 fixation in terrestrial ecosystems. For these reasons, understanding how diversity in leaf form in generated is of considerable interest to scientists. To study this problem we work with the hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), which is a plant that has leaves fully subdivided into small leaflets. The presence of leaflets makes this plant very different to its close relative the thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), which has entire, undivided leaves. We already know a lot about how entire leaf shape is produced in A.thaliana because it is easy to grow and do experiments with. Hairy bittercress is also very easy to work with in the lab, so we will use it to understand how leaflets are produced, what controls their number, and ultimately why this plant makes leaflets whereas its relative the thale cress does not.