Rice is one of the world’s most familiar staple foods, but how does a single cell develop into a rice plant with specialized tissues and organs? A new study offers a detailed look at this process through a three-dimensional (3D) spatiotemporal atlas covering 10 organs and 61 developmental stages across the rice life cycle, from seed to seed.

The study, published in Cell, was conducted by a research team led by professor Yang Weicai from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with several other research teams.

The plant life cycle alternates between a haploid phase, which produces sperm and egg cells, and a diploid phase, which develops following fertilization. In plants, the diploid zygote develops into a multicellular organism through coordinated cell divisions and cell fate specification. Understanding how these processes are regulated across different tissues and developmental stages is a fundamental goal of developmental biology.