Lateral root formation can be divided into two major phases: pericycle activation and meristem establishment. In Arabidopsis, the first lateral root initiation event is spatially and temporally asynchronous and involves a limited number of cells in the xylem pericycle. To study the molecular regulation during pericycle activation, we developed a lateral rootinducible system. Successive treatments with an auxin transport inhibitor and exogenous auxin were used to prevent the first formative divisions and then to activate the entire pericycle. Our morphological and molecular data show that, in this inducible system, xylem pericycle activation was synchronized and enhanced to cover the entire length of the root. The results also indicate that the inducible system can be considered a novel in planta system for the study of synchronized cell cycle reactivation. In addition, the expression patterns of Kip-Related Protein2 ( KRP2 ) in the pericycle and its ectopic expression data revealed that the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor plays a significant role in the regulation of lateral root initiation. KRP2 appears to regulate early lateral root initiation by blocking the G1-to-S transition and to be regulated transcriptionally by auxin.

At the onset of lateral root initiation in Arabidopsis thaliana, the phytohormone auxin activates xylem pole pericycle cells for asymmetric cell division. However, the molecular events leading from auxin to lateral root initiation are poorly understood, in part because the few responsive cells in the process are embedded in the root and are thus difficult to access. A lateral root induction system, in which most xylem pole pericycle cells were synchronously activated by auxin transport inhibition followed by auxin application, was used for microarray transcript profiling. Of 4,600 genes analyzed, 906 significantly differentially regulated genes were identified that could be grouped into six major clusters. Basically, three major patterns were discerned representing induced, repressed, and transiently expressed genes. Analysis of the coregulated genes, which were specific for each time point, provided new insight into the molecular regulation and signal transduction preceding lateral root initiation in Arabidopsis. The reproducible expression profiles during a time course allowed us to define four stages that precede the cell division in the pericycle. These early stages were characterized by G 1 cell cycle block, auxin perception, and signal transduction, followed by progression over G 1͞S transition and G2͞M transition. All these processes took place within 6 h after transfer from N-1-naphthylphthalamic acid to 1-naphthalene acetic acid. These results indicate that this lateral root induction system represents a unique synchronized system that allows the systematic study of the developmental program upstream of the cell cycle activation during lateral root initiation.auxin ͉ cell cycle ͉ microarray