Plant developmental responses to the environment: eco-devo insights

Evolutionary ecology and developmental biology have converged on the key insight that phenotypic expression is powerfully conditioned by environmental information. Plant ecological development (eco-devo) aims to firstly, determine precisely how plants perceive and respond to the varying environmental conditions they encounter in the real world and secondly, understand the ecological and evolutionary consequences of environmentally mediated phenotypic outcomes. This full explanatory scope, from molecular interactions to natural populations and communities, is just now being realized for two adaptively important aspects of developmental response: shade avoidance and flood tolerance. These and other new findings point to the complex, interactive nature of both environmental cues and gene-regulatory networks, and confirm the importance of incorporating realistic environmental variation into studies of development.