Image dataset from: Time-dependent bistability leads to to critical slowing down during floral transition in Arabidopsis

Confocal image data from the manuscript "Time-dependent bistability leads to critical slowing down during floral transition in Arabidopsis" by Rodriguez-Maroto and Wang et al. See Readme file for more information.

Developmental transitions occur in the life cycles of all multicellular organisms. Despite their fundamental relevance, the underlying dynamics remain poorly understood. In plants, floral transition is a key developmental process whereby the shoot apical meristem changes from producing leaves to forming flowers. Using quantitative imaging, developmental genetics and dynamical systems theory, we show that a time-dependent bistable switch between expression of APETALA2, a key floral inhibitor, and the floral activators SUPPRESSOR OF OVEREXPRESSION OF CONSTANS 1 and FRUITFULL, can explain the dynamics of floral transition in Arabidopsis. Notably, we detect a slowing down of the inhibitor dynamics, consistent with the system crossing a critical point of a bistable switch and transiently experiencing a ghost attractor. We demonstrate that only this time-dependent bistability can generate the range of dynamical behaviours measured across genotypes, including oscillations in the inhibitor. We propose that time-dependent bistability is a robust dynamical mechanism for regulating floral transition as well as other developmental decisions.