Don’t ‘leaf’ now. The making of a fruit

The fruit of Arabidopsis thaliana is derived from two fused carpels in the centre of the developing flower. Significant progress has been made in the study of Arabidopsis gynoecium and fruit development during the past few years with the identification of key regulators and analysis of the interactions between them. Many of these factors also have roles in leaf development, thereby emphasising the evolutionary origin of carpels as modified leaves. Although work on fruit development has largely been focused on the analysis of individual genes and mutants, the data clearly indicate that in order to get an integrated view of fruit patterning it is necessary to understand the role of the plant hormone auxin in the process and how it becomes distributed.