On the one hand, in vitro plant regeneration can be exploited to understand many fundamental questions pertaining to subjects such as stem cell specification, cell fate determination, cell differentiation, meristem formation and organogenesis in the absence of positional information laid down during embryogenesis. This spectacular property of plant cells has great impact on both, basic plant research and biotechnological application. The profound capacity of somatic cells to reproduce an entire organism has been widely exploited in in vitro plant regeneration. Our method is highly efficient, independent of genotypes tested and suitable to study the reprogramming of LRP to shoot in intact plants as well as in excised roots. As a demonstration, using a battery of cell fate specific markers, we show that confocal time-lapse imaging can be employed to uncover the early molecular events, intermediate developmental phases and relative abundance of stem cell regulators during the conversion of LRP to shoot. The entire conversion process can be adequately analyzed by histological and imaging techniques. We show that, the conversion process is highly responsive to developmental stages of LRP and changes in external environmental stimuli such as temperature. This protocol can be readily applied to the various ecotypes of Arabidopsis. Here we present an efficient protocol for the direct conversion of LRP to a complete fertile shoot system. This has limited our ability to study the dynamic phases of reprogramming at cellular and molecular levels. Until now, however, a robust method that allows the efficient conversion of LRP to shoot is lacking. The conversion of lateral root primordium (LRP) to shoot is an ideal method for plant propagation and for plant researchers to understand the mechanism underlying trans-differentiation. Plants have the remarkable property to elaborate entire body plan from any tissue part.

Primordia resolution