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Time-dependent bistability leads to critical slowing down during floral transition in Arabidopsis

Rodriguez-Maroto, G.; Wang, K.; Casanova-Ferrer, P.; Cerise, M.; Coupland, G.; Formosa-Jordan, P.

2025-12-11 systems biology
10.64898/2025.12.09.692976 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Developmental transitions occur in the life cycles of all multicellular organisms. Despite their fundamental relevance, the underlying dynamics remain poorly understood. In plants, floral transition is a key developmental process whereby the shoot apical meristem changes from producing leaves to flowers. Using quantitative imaging, developmental genetics and dynamical systems theory, we show that a time-dependent bistable switch between APETALA2, a key floral inhibitor, and the floral activators SUPPRESSOR OF OVEREXPRESSION OF CONSTANS 1 and FRUITFULL, can explain the dynamics of floral transition in Arabidopsis. Notably, we detect a slowing down of the inhibitor dynamics, consistent with having a system crossing a critical point of a bistable switch and transiently experiencing a ghost attractor. We demonstrate that only this time-dependent bistability can generate the range of dynamical behaviours measured across genotypes, including oscillations in the inhibitor. We propose that time-dependent bistability is a robust dynamical mechanism for regulating developmental transitions.

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