An ancient transcriptional regulatory module for tip growth has been conserved throughout the vascular plant lineage

Abstract

The root hair development of vascular plants can be divided into 2 major processes, fate determination and hair morphogenesis, and the latter should be governed by the former so as to express the morphogenetic toolkits in a root hair-specific manner. Vascular plants, depending on taxa, show different fate-determining mechanisms for hair cell/non-hair cell fates, which leads to a question whether the downstream mophogenetic regulatory module is diverged accordingly to the upstream fate determiners or not. Our study demonstrates that the module of a transcription factor and a root hair-specific cis-element (RHE) for root hair-specific expression of morphogenetic toolkit genes is conserved in spite of different fate-determing mechanisms.