It's time to flower: the genetic control of flowering time

Abstract

In plants, successful sexual reproduction and the ensuing development of seeds and fruits depend on flowering at the right time. This involves coordinating flowering with the appropriate season and with the developmental history of the plant. Genetic and molecular analysis in the small cruciform weed, Arabidopsis, has revealed distinct but linked pathways that are responsible for detecting the major seasonal cues of day length and cold temperature, as well as other local environmental and internal signals. The balance of signals from these pathways is integrated by a common set of genes to determine when flowering occurs. Excitingly, it has been discovered that many of these same genes regulate flowering in other plants, such as rice. This review focuses on recent advances in how three of the signalling pathways (the day-length, vernalisation and autonomous pathways) function to control flowering.

Local Selection Across a Latitudinal Gradient Shapes Nucleotide Diversity in Balsam Poplar, Populus balsamifera L

“…The functional role of FRI in temperature-induced phenological responses makes this gene a particularly strong candidate for local adaptation to regional differences in growing season length. Among natural accessions of A. thaliana, FRI is a major regulator of flowering-time variation by controlling expression of FLC to produce a vernalization requirement in high latitude accessions, permitting flowering only after a prolonged exposure to cold temperatures (Johanson et al 2000;Mouradov et al 2002;Putterill et al 2004). In balsam poplar, our analyses implicate FRI in the response to local selection at different latitudes, probably reflecting a role of FRI in the temperaturesensitive timing of seasonal development.…”

“…These data provide an opportunity to investigate the repeatability of ecological adaptation at the molecular level (Stern and Orgogozo 2009), and in a gene network that is known to control important life-history phenotypes (Mouradov et al 2002;Putterill et al 2004;Lagercrantz 2009). In both P. balsamifera and A. thaliana, the strongest candidate for local adaptation to conditions that covary with latitiude is FRI, which harbors high polymorphism as well as elevated subpopulation differentiation between northern and southern accessions in both species (LeCorre 2002(LeCorre , 2005Caicedo et al 2004;Stinchcombe et al 2004; this study).…”

Reproductive physiology of mango

“…Zhang et al (2005) and Davenport et al (2006b) isolated a CONSTANS-like gene (MiCOL) from mango leaf DNA by a combination of genomic walking and PCR methods. CONSTANS is a circadian expression gene interacting with the photoperiodic pathway in Arabidopsis (Putterill et al, 2004). This gene is central to activation of the FT gene in Arabidopsis during long days, but because mango is non-photoperiodic, the role of this gene in mango flowering systems remains unclear.…”

Biological Rhythms Workshop IA: Molecular Basis of Rhythms Generation

“…Although molecular output pathways in most organisms are not clearly understood, circadian regulation of the flowering pathway in Arabidopsis has been defined ( Fig. 12) (for review, see Putterill et al 2004). GI and SPINDLY (SPY) interact to activate circadian-regulated expression of CONSTANS (CO).…”