Tuning the cell-cycle engine for improved plant performance

Cell-cycle regulation plays a crucial role in organogenesis, morphogenesis, growth and differentiation and conceptually offers a means to design a next generation of crop plants that outperform traditionally bred ones. However, cell-cycle regulation involves a large, highly redundant, set of genes, which complicates unravelling of function in the context of a higher plant. Nevertheless, ten years of molecular cell-cycle research, primarily in the model plant Arabidopsis, have demonstrated its potential for altering plant development.