Project description:The debate on the origin and evolution of flowers has recently entered the field of developmental genetics, with focus on the design of the ancestral floral regulatory program. Flowers can differ dramatically among angiosperm lineages, but in general, sterile perianth organs surrounding stamens (male reproductive organs) and carpels (female reproductive organs) constitute the basic floral structure. However, the basal angiosperm lineages exhibit spectacular diversity in the number, arrangement, and structure, of floral organs, while the evolutionarily derived monocot and eudicot lineages share a far more uniform floral ground plan. As such, regulatory mechanisms underlying the archetypal floral plan, for instance that of the eudicot genetic model Arabidopsis thaliana, are unlikely to apply to the original flowers. Here we show that broadly overlapping transcriptional programs characterise the floral transcriptome of the basal angiosperm Persea americana (avocado), while floral gene expression domains are typically organ-specific in Arabidopsis. Our findings extend the “fading borders” model for basal angiosperms from organ identity genes to the downstream floral transcriptome, and suggest that the combinatorial mechanism for organ identity may not operate in basal angiosperms as it does in Arabidopsis. Furthermore, fading expression of components of the stamen transcriptome in central and peripheral regions of Persea flowers resembles the developmental program of the hypothesized gymnosperm “floral progenitor”. Accordingly, in contrast to the canalized organ-specific regulatory apparatus of Arabidopsis, floral development may have been originally regulated by overlapping transcriptional cascades with fading gradients of influence from focal to bordering organs.
