Emphasizing the Role of Proteins in Construction of the Developmental Genetic Toolkit in Plants

The diversity in land plants due to size, shape, and form is the combined result of different developmental processes for adult plant formation from the zygote and their evolution. The ancestral patterning toolkit designed by Floyd [1] for land plants was constructed by using developmentally important gene families that are responsible for flowering plant growth, patterning, and differentiation. In this chapter we search for the candidate genes, which are important for different stages of embryogenesis of the model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana in light of the dynamical patterning modules concept. This is a novel idea that Newman [2] applied to build a developmental genetic toolkit by using a set of genes that mobilize the physical processes that are important in metazoan development. In this chapter we focus on a small number of gene families, which are related to physical characteristics, such as turgor pressure, asymmetric cell division, asymmetric distribution of cellular components, anisotropic expansion, and dynamics in merstemic cell maintenance and finally establish their evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) roles in land plant development with a functional/biological analysis.