Abstract
The biological clock plays essential roles for sleep and hormonal regulation in animals, and for flowering and leaf movement regulation in plants. In animals, it is well known that a strong master clock in the brain tunes peripheral clocks in peripheral organs. In contrast, it is unknown whether a master clock and peripheral clocks exist in plants. However, there are evidences to suggest that plants may have master and peripheral clocks similar to animals- (1) animal and plant clocks have similar underlying molecular mechanisms, (2) plants integrate individual cellular circadian rhythms into a single individual rhythm to achieve flowering and leaf movement. This suggests the existence of tissue-specific clock in plants similar to animals. Since plants don't have an organ equivalent to the brain, and it is difficult to excise specific tissues from plants, tissue -specific clock function has remained elusive. Here we show two novel methods for monitoring clock gene expression in the tissue-specific manner. One is direct tissues isolation with high time resolution and another is non-invasive imaging for clock gene dynamics.
