Despite its economic and environmental significance, understanding the molecular biology
of secondary growth (ie wood formation) in tree species has been lagging behind that of
primary growth, primarily due to the inherent difficulties of tree biology. In recent years,
Arabidopsis has been shown to express all of the major components of secondary growth.
Arabidopsis was induced to undergo secondary growth and the transcriptome profile
changes were surveyed during secondary growth using 8.3 K Arabidopsis Genome Arrays …

Secondary growth and wood formation are products of the vascular cambium, a lateral
meristem. Although the mechanisms have only recently begun to be uncovered,
transcriptional regulation appears increasingly central to the regulation of secondary growth.
The importance of transcriptional regulation is illustrated by the correlation of expression of
specific classes of genes with related biological processes occurring at specific stages of
secondary growth, including cell division, cell expansion, and cell differentiation. At the …