Patterns of beauty – omics meets plant development

Developmental biology aims to identify mechanisms that govern cell proliferation and differentiation in the body plan formation of multicellular organisms. In the past, developmental biologists described how anatomy and morphology are established during ontogenesis, and developmental geneticists identified many developmental regulators. In contrast to the traditional approaches that mostly focus on one or a few genes at a time, highly parallel profiling technologies have been developed for use in biological research over the past decade. Such parallel profiling technologies probe many genes, transcripts, proteins or metabolites at once. In this review, I discuss the growing impact of transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and modelling on plant developmental biology. Novel profiling technologies will not make traditional gene-centred approaches obsolete but should instead complement forward developmental genetics.