From rhizome diffusion to programmable architecture: a systems framework for controllable spatial expansion in bamboo and other clonal plants

Introduction Rhizome-driven spatial expansion in bamboo and other clonal plants is governed jointly by architectural patterning, belowground bud bank demography, hormonal crosstalk, carbon allocation, environmental plasticity and genomic regulation. This integrative review synthesises those strands and then asks a question the field has not yet answered explicitly: how much of the mechanistic framework now invoked for programmable rhizome control has actually been demonstrated in a woody bamboo? Methods Literature was retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed and CNKI and appraised along two axes — the biological provenance of each observation (woody bamboo; other rhizomatous or stoloniferous perennial; annual, herbaceous or model system) and its causal strength (perturbation-based, correlative, or conceptual). Results The appraisal shows that architectural description, running-versus-clumping contrasts and clonal integration are supported by causal or quantitative evidence in bamboo itself, whereas the auxin -cytokinin -strigolactone module, BRANCHED1/ TB1 repression, KNOX -mediated architectural control and the Tre6P - SnRK1 - TOR growth switch are supported in bamboo correlatively or not at all, having been imported from Arabidopsis, rice, potato, poplar and Nicotiana. Discussion On that basis we propose a three-tier genome-editing framework ordered by intervention depth, and argue that in bamboo the binding constraint is delivery rather than target choice: because gregarious monocarpic flowering precludes segregation-based transgene removal, ribonucleoprotein editing of cis-regulatory elements in a transformable Dendrocalamus or Bambusa background is presently the only route to a transgene-free edited plant, and vegetative containment necessarily dominates reproductive containment. We identify five quantities that the current corpus does not report, including lateral extension rate with variance, barrier breach probability as a function of embedment and inspection interval, and the minimum regenerative rhizome fragment size, and convert them into a staged, falsifiable research agenda with explicit go/no-go criteria.