VH1, a provascular cell-specific receptor kinase that influences leaf cell patterns in Arabidopsis

The formation of the venation pattern in leaves is ideal for examining signaling pathways that recognize and respond to spatial and temporal information, because the pattern is two-dimensional and heritable and the resulting veins influence the three-dimensional spatial organization of the surrounding differentiating leaf cell types. We identified a provascular/procambial cell-specific gene that encodes a Leu-rich repeat receptor kinase, which we named VASCULAR HIGHWAY1 (VH1). A change in the expression domain and level of VH1 marks the transition from an uncommitted provascular state to a committed procambial state in early vascular development. The coding sequence, expression pattern, and transgenic phenotypes together suggest that VH1 transduces extracellular spatial and temporal signals into downstream cell differentiation responses in provascular/procambial cells.