Gravity sensing, a largely misunderstood trigger of plant orientated growth

Gravity is a crucial environmental factor regulating plant growth and development. Plants have the ability to sense a change in the direction of gravity, which leads to the re-orientation of their growth direction, so-called gravitropism. In general, plant stems grow upward (negative gravitropism), whereas roots grow downward (positive gravitropism). Models describing the gravitropic response following the tilting of plants are presented and highlight that gravitropic curvature involves both gravisensing and mechanosensing, thus allowing to revisit experimental data. We also discuss the challenge to set up experimental designs for discriminating between gravisensing and mechanosensing. We then present the cellular events and the molecular actors known to be specifically involved in gravity sensing.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Frontiers in Plant Science

• Publication date

  2014-11-05

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpls.2014.00610PMID 25414717PMCID 4220637
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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