“…There are several parallel signaling pathways involved in root stem cell niche maintenance, such as SHR-SCR [46][47][48][49][50], CLE40-ACR4/CLV1-WOX5 [19,20], and RGF1-PLT pathways [25,30,51,52]. To examine which pathway was mainly affected in the quintuple mutant, The expression levels and patterns of both SHR and SCR are not significantly altered in the quintuple mutant compared with the wild-type plant (Supplementary information, Figure S3A and S3B), which is consistent with root cross section results, showing that there are no obvious cell differentiation defects in the quintuple mutant (Supplementary information, Figure S1C).…”