Variations on a theme flower development and evolution 英文参考文献.docVIP

/2000/1/2/reviews/1015.1 Minireview Variations on a theme: flower development and evolution Vivian F Irish Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. E-mail: vivian.irish@ Published: 4 August 2000 GenomeBiology 2000, 1(2):reviews1015.1–1015.4 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2000/1/2/reviews/1015 ? GenomeB (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) Abstract A recent study, comparing the maizeSILKY1 gene to its well-characterized homologAPETALA3 from Arabidopsis, has provided some of the first evidence pointing to conservation of homeotic gene function between monocots and dicots. The genomics era has heralded the accumulation of an unprecedented amount of sequence information from a vast array of species. With this wealth of information, the issue at hand is to determine to what extent homologous genes from different species function in a similar manner, as well as the extent to which their roles have diversified. Gene expression and loss-of-function studies are now paving the way for comparative functional studies in several model species, and may soon provide us with mechanistic explanations for how different morphologies have evolved. flower was small and few-parted, in contrast to the more tradi- tional view that the earliest angiosperms had large, multiparted flowers similar to present day magnolias [5,6]. In addition, the fossil evidence, although fragmentary, also supports the idea that the primitive angiosperm flower lacked perianth organs [7-9]. If the earliest angiosperm flower indeed consisted of just stamens and carpels, then perianth organs must have arisen during the course of angiosperm evolution. Within the angiosperms, two monophyletic groups have been identified, the monocots and the eudicots, and these are contained within a basal assemblage of magnoliid