title: The plant perceptron connects environment to development.
abstract: Plants cope with the environment in a variety of ways, and ecological analyses attempt to capture this through life-history strategies or trait-based categorization. These approaches are limited because they treat the trade-off mechanisms that underlie plant responses as a black box. Approaches that involve the molecular or physiological analysis of plant responses to the environment have elucidated intricate connections between developmental and environmental signals, but in only a few well-studied model species. By considering diversity in the plant response to the environment as the adaptation of an information-processing network, new directions can be found for the study of life-history strategies, trade-offs and evolution in plants.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Plant Developmental Biology, Wageningen University, PO Box 8123, 6700 ES Wageningen, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Ben
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Scheres
authors.affiliation: Department of Terrestrial Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology, PO Box 50, 6700 AB Wageningen, the Netherlands.|Laboratory of Nematology, Wageningen University, PO Box 8 123, 6700 ES Wageningen, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Wim H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: van der Putten
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D063245:Plant Development; D010944:Plants / Q000378:metabolism*; D015398:Signal Transduction