CRITICAL QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN

The progress achieved in the last 15 years toward unraveling the plant circadian clock mechanism is remarkable, but much remains unfinished. An outline of the oscillator mechanism has emerged but remains incomplete. Although we can safely conclude that the paradigm of interlocked feedback loops constituting a circadian oscillator is conserved in plants, not all the components have yet been identified, and the mechanistic details of almost every step are only incompletely understood. It is humbling that, after so much effort and progress, almost all questions remain only incompletely answered and, effectively, all questions remain! Moreover, the field is now expanding its view from the purely reductionist goal of identifying the oscillator itself to a consideration of the evolutionary and ecological consequences of variation in clock function, so a host of new questions are being considered. It is exhilarating to consider what a retrospective view a decade from now will reveal.