Floral development: an integrated view

This chapter reviews current knowledge about the development of flowers in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. It describes how a flower develops at the morphological level and the nature of the gene regulatory network that controls the different steps of this process. The chapter focuses on regulations occurring at the transcriptional and chromatin levels and lists the most prevalent proteins that act as key regulators. The latest methods available for modeling how these regulators work and studying their role at the genome-wide level are presented. Finally, the structural specificities of transcription factors acting specifically to define the flower are described.