Morales-Tapia Alejandro, Cruz-Ramírez Alfredo
Molecular and Developmental Complexity Group, Unidad de Genómica Avanzada, Langebio-Cinvestav Irapuato, México.
Front Plant Sci. 2016 Dec 20;7:1881. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2016.01881. eCollection 2016.
Since the development of agriculture, humans have relied on the cultivation of plants to satisfy our increasing demand for food, natural products, and other raw materials. As we understand more about plant development, we can better manipulate plants to fulfill our particular needs. Auxins are a class of simple metabolites that coordinate many developmental activities like growth and the appearance of functional structures in plants. Computational modeling of auxin has proven to be an excellent tool in elucidating many mechanisms that underlie these developmental events. Due to the complexity of these mechanisms, current modeling efforts are concerned only with single phenomena focused on narrow spatial and developmental contexts; but a general model of plant development could be assembled by integrating the insights from all of them. In this perspective, we summarize the current collection of auxin-driven computational models, focusing on how they could come together into a single model for plant development. A model of this nature would allow researchers to test hypotheses and yield accurate predictions about the behavior of a plant under a given set of physical and biochemical constraints. It would also provide a solid foundation toward the establishment of plant engineering, a proposed discipline intended to enable the design and production of plants that exhibit an arbitrarily defined set of features.
自农业发展以来，人类一直依靠种植植物来满足我们对食物、天然产物及其他原材料日益增长的需求。随着我们对植物发育了解得更多，我们就能更好地操控植物以满足我们的特定需求。生长素是一类简单的代谢产物，可协调植物中许多发育活动，如生长和功能结构的出现。生长素的计算建模已被证明是阐明这些发育事件背后诸多机制的出色工具。由于这些机制的复杂性，当前的建模工作仅关注聚焦于狭窄空间和发育背景的单一现象；但通过整合所有这些见解，可以构建一个植物发育的通用模型。从这个角度出发，我们总结了当前生长素驱动的计算模型集合，重点关注它们如何能够整合为一个植物发育的单一模型。这种性质的模型将使研究人员能够检验假设，并对给定物理和生化条件下植物的行为做出准确预测。它还将为建立植物工程学提供坚实基础，植物工程学是一门旨在实现设计和生产具有任意定义特征集的植物的拟议学科。
