College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
Sci China Life Sci. 2019 Apr;62(4):453-466. doi: 10.1007/s11427-018-9457-1. Epub 2019 Feb 21.
Plants are a group of multicellular organisms crucial for the biosphere on the Earth. In the 17th century, the founding fathers of modern botany viewed the bud as the basic unit undergoing the plant life cycle. However, for many understandable reasons, the dominant conceptual framework evolved away from the "bud-centered" viewpoint to a "plant-centered" viewpoint that treated the whole plant, consisting of numerous buds, as a unit and considered the entire plant to be the functional equivalent of an animal individual. While this "plant-centered" viewpoint is convenient and great progress has been made using this conceptual framework, some fundamental problems remain logically unsolvable. Previously, I have proposed a new conceptual framework for interpretation of plant morphogenesis, called Plant Morphogenesis 123, which revives a "bud-centered" viewpoint. The perspective of Plant Morphogenesis 123 allows us to address new questions regarding to the mechanisms of plant morphogenesis that are important, and technically accessible, but previously neglected under the "plant-centered" conceptual framework. In addition to describing these questions, I address a more fundamental question for further discussion: why do people study plants?
植物是地球上生物圈的重要组成部分。在 17 世纪，现代植物学的奠基人将芽视为经历植物生命周期的基本单位。然而，由于许多可以理解的原因，主导的概念框架逐渐偏离了“以芽为中心”的观点，转向了“以植物为中心”的观点，即将由许多芽组成的整个植物作为一个单位，并认为整个植物在功能上等同于动物个体。虽然这种“以植物为中心”的观点很方便，并且在使用这个概念框架方面取得了很大的进展，但一些基本问题在逻辑上仍然无法解决。我之前提出了一种新的植物形态发生学解释的概念框架，称为植物形态发生学 123，它重新采用了“以芽为中心”的观点。植物形态发生学 123 的观点使我们能够解决一些新的问题，这些问题涉及植物形态发生的机制，这些机制很重要，并且在技术上是可行的，但在“以植物为中心”的概念框架下被忽视了。除了描述这些问题，我还提出了一个更基本的问题供进一步讨论：人们为什么要研究植物？
