[4] Through recent studies, Apetala 2 is found to have a major role in hormone regulation, specific in flowers and plants, such as the AGAMOUS.

[5] The study that determined this, done by Ogawa, was created to clarify the relationship between Apetala 2 and AtEBP in gene expression.

The results showed that over-expression of AtEBP caused upregulation of AP2 expression in leaves which suggested that the N-terminal region is not required to produce AP2-like phenotypes.

PhAP2B and PhAP2C encode for AP2-like proteins that belong to a different subgroup of the AP2 family of transcription factors and exhibit very different expression patterns during flower development compared to PhAP2A.

In an AP2 study for instance, an ERF/AP2-type transcription factor was isolated by differential-display reverse transcription-PCR, which induced a hypersensitive response in the leaves.