Three-dimensional progression of programmed death in the rice coleoptile

Plant death during development is a highly orchestrated process at the cellular, tissue, organ, and whole-plant levels. The process toward death is endogenously programmed in plants. With our original approach called "three-dimensional analysis" using the rice coleoptile, we revealed detailed morphological alterations in the progression of senescence and programmed cell death involved in the air space (aerenchyma) formation at both tissue and cellular levels. Although these two types of cell death exhibited a distinct pattern of progression at the tissue level, the set of intracellular events was highly conserved. From those comprehensive investigations, we hypothesized that the identical program of death functions in each process of cell death, and that the initiation and progression of cell death is highly regulated by the environmental input.