Hibiscus bullseyes reveal mechanisms controlling petal pattern proportions that influence plant-pollinator interactions

Colourful flower patterns are key signals to attract pollinators. To produce such motifs, plants specify boundaries dividing petals into subdomains where cells develop distinctive pigmentations, shapes and textures. While some transcription factors and biosynthetic pathways behind these characteristics are well-studied, the upstream processes restricting their activities to specific petal regions remain enigmatic. Here, we unveil that the petal surface of Hibiscus trionum, an emerging model featuring a bullseye on its corolla, is pre-patterned as the bullseye boundary position is specified long before it becomes visible. Using a computational model, we explore how pattern proportions are maintained while petals experience a 100-fold size increase. Exploiting transgenic lines and natural variants, we show that plants can regulate boundary position during the pre-patterning phase or modulate growth either side of this boundary later in development to vary bullseye proportions. Such modifi..., See Methods in our manuscript, , # Hibiscus bullseyes reveal mechanisms controlling petal pattern proportions that influence plant-pollinator interactions

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj745](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj745)

This contains the data associated with bee behavioural experiments (Figure 7) as well as quantifications associated with characterisation of cell behaviour across the adaxial petal epidermis of H. trionum wild-type and over expression HtTCP4.1 transgenic line as well of H. richardsonii (Figure 1-6). This also contains all the code associated with the computational 1-dimensional model.

## Description of the data and file structure

**Data_Source.zip folder contains:**

Bumblebees.xlsx file - This file contains the raw data related to our bumblebee behavioural experiments (Fig. 7 and Fig. S8)

This folder also contains six files reporting the raw data used to characterise cell behaviour:

**boundaries.csv**

* tag: describe flower genotype
* stage: describe stage of the petal primordi...