Focus on root development

Roots anchor the growing plant while foraging for water and mineral nutrients. Due to these critical roles, the formation, development, growth, architecture, and physiology of roots have long been a focus of scientific interest, inspiring a wide range of research directions. Here, we highlight recent studies and updates in the field that address fundamental questions and emphasize how advanced approaches and evolving tools are being used to explore root developmental programs and their interactions with the environment across multiple scales.

We dedicate this focus on root development to the late Philip N. Benfey, whose contributions to the field have shaped and inspired the scientific journey of the entire research community.

Roots are amazing organs as they can adapt their growth and shape their architecture depending on the environment, making them an excellent system to study developmental programs. Knowledge generated from studying the model plant Arabidopsis has been the foundation that paved the way to study developmental processes in various plant species, including crops, trees, and even parasitic plants. Most plant species have organized and well-defined cellular structures where cells are arranged in different files within the tissue layer where they reside. The tissue components of the root meristem are conserved between species, with differences primarily lay in the number of tissue layers; for instance, Arabidopsis seems to be the only species with 1 cortex layer when compared to model crops (Dolan et al. 1993). The update by Ramachandran et al. (2024) discusses how studying root meristem and tissue composition in species that are adapted to contrasting habitats has shown structural patterns that contribute to developmental adaptation in plants growing in arid habitats and those adapted to high salinity and hypoxia. It also describes developmental programs explaining how parasitic plants convert their root system to haustoria to invade their host and hijack their nutrients.