Control of stem cell behavior by CLE-JINGASA signaling in the shoot apical meristem in Marchantia polymorpha

Land plants undergo indeterminate growth by the activity of meristems in both gametophyte (haploid) and sporophyte (diploid) generations. In the sporophyte of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the apical meristems are located at the shoot and root tips in which a number of regulatory gene homologs are shared for their development, implying deep evolutionary origins. However, little is known about their functional conservation with gametophytic meristems in distantly related land plants such as bryophytes, even though genomic studies have revealed that the subfamily-level diversity of regulatory genes is mostly conserved throughout land plants. Here, we show that a NAM/ATAF/CUC (NAC) domain transcription factor, JINGASA (MpJIN), acts downstream of CLAVATA3 (CLV3)/ESR-related (CLE) peptide signaling and controls stem cell behavior in the gametophytic shoot apical meristem of the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. In the meristem, strong MpJIN expression was associated with the periclinal cell division at the periphery of the stem cell zone (SCZ), whereas faint MpJIN expression was found at the center of the SCZ. Time course observation indicates that the MpJIN-negative cells are lost from the SCZ and respecified de novo at two separate positions during the dichotomous branching event. Consistently, the induction of MpJIN results in ectopic periclinal cell division in the SCZ and meristem termination. Based on the comparative expression data, we speculate that the function of JIN/FEZ subfamily genes was shared among the shoot apical meristems in the gametophyte and sporophyte generations in early land plants but was lost in certain lineages, including the flowering plant A. thaliana.