Root hairs develop on the emerging roots of Arabidopsis plants in a regular pattern of tidy files of neatly spaced hairs. A suite of transcription factors manages the fates of root cells in response to lateral inhibition. Kwak et al. have now identified a gene termed SCRAMBLED, which encodes a putative receptor-like kinase protein that seems to function as a regulator of the overall transcriptional response. Scrambled enables the developing epidermal cells to interpret their position and establish the appropriate cell type pattern.
S.-H. Kwak, R. Shen, J. Schiefelbein, Positional signaling mediated by a receptor-like kinase in Arabidopsis. Science 307, 1111-1113 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]
