New Plant Part Discovered: Scientists Studied Weed for More Than 100 Years

A new plant part was recently discovered, something that scientists have been examining for more than 100 years already.

A ScienceAlert report said, one of the best-examined plants in the field of science is a tiny, unassuming weed called Thale cress or Arabidopsis thaliana. It is a model organism, basically making it the plant world's so-called "lab rat."

Consequently, it is quite surprising that scientists have discovered an entirely new part of the Arabidopsis plant, which they claimed they had somehow missed for more than a century.

Even if an individual is not a plant scientist, he perhaps, knows what thale cress looks like. The weed is considered a native plant to Africa, Asia, and Europe, where it will happily sprout in sandy soils or even just holes or openings in concrete.

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'Cantil'

In the scientific world, it's been an excellent plant genetics workhorse for many years. A. thaliana, as described in the US National Library of Medicine, was the first plant to sequence its genome, and has been grown on the International Space Station, attempted to be developed on the Moon.

This newly-found structure, which the team has identified as "cantil," is not hidden or too tiny to see. Usually, the flower-bearing stalk develops out of the plant's main stem; on the contrary, a "cantil" is jutting out horizontally from the stem, holding the flower stalk out farther, much like the cantilever, its so-called architectural namesake.

The reason such structures have just been discovered is that cantils, according to a similar Phys.org report, are exceptionally rare, forming only if the plant has been forced to hold or blossoming, as it does when sunlight becomes limited by shorter days.

According to Pennsylvania State University plant biologist Timothy Gookin, he initially observed the cantils in 2008.

He added, at first, he did not trust any of the results, thinking it needed to be an artifact of genetic contamination, probably combined with ecological contamination of the water, fertilizer, soil, or even the forming air supply.

Growth of More Plants Needed

When humans mess with a plant the manner Arabidopsis has been, he can get some strange stuff. Essentially, mutations can make the plants tinier, taller, develop double flowers and heat tolerance, among others.

However, it appears that cantils were not developed from contamination or mutation. Rather, cantils are only forming at that time, the plant starts flowering, and only after the plant has been delayed flowering in the first place, typically because of short days.

It took more than 12 years of experimentation to certainly get a grasp on what is being seen and to decipher how cantils were controlled.

A Natural Occurrence

This study, Science has discovered a completely new plant part - the 'cantil,' published in Development, necessitated the growth of more than 3,700 plants to complete maturity and the manual inspection of more than 20,000 flower-bearing stalks in over 30 distinctive plant lines, Gookin explained.

Finally, the plant biologist added, he finally deemed the cantils a natural occurrence after identifying them in non-mutant or wild-type plants from different sources, growing in independent areas and different conditions.

Additionally, the reason cantils occur, though, remains a mystery. It can be expected yet more research on this hard-working lab plant to find out what's happening.

One speculative interpretation, added Gookin, is that the cantil depicts a highly repressed ancestral association between various types of flowering plant architectures.

The genetic and environmental factors multiple layers regulating cantil development are certainly quite striking.

Related information is shown on Labocine's YouTube video below: