Mass flowering of the tropical tree <i><scp>S</scp>horea beccariana</i> was preceded by expression changes in flowering and drought‐responsive genes

Kobayashi, Masaki J.; Takeuchi, Yayoi; Kenta, Tanaka; Kume, Tomonori; Diway, Bibian; Shimizu, Kentaro

doi:10.1111/mec.12344

Cited by 74 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Topics ranged from investigations of mass flowering in tropical trees (Kobayashi et al . ), dispersal limitations in arctic protists (Heger et al . ), the importance of symbiotic bacteria for ant disease defenses (Rodriguez‐Lanetty et al .…”

Section: Highlights Of 2013mentioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial 2014

Rieseberg¹,

Vines²,

Gow³

et al. 2013

Molecular Ecology

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Section: Highlights Of 2013mentioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial 2014

Rieseberg¹,

Vines²,

Gow³

et al. 2013

Molecular Ecology

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“…For instance, limited water availability treatments accelerate flowering in Arabidopsis but delay flowering in rice (Galbiati et al, 2016). Moreover, alterations to pathways by which drought or nitrogen availability regulate the expression of floral inducers have likely been critical for the evolution of mass flowering and masting in many perennial species (Kobayashi et al, 2013;Miyazaki et al, 2014). But overall, limited work has described the physiological parameters that characterize these responses, the genetic mechanisms that transduce the cue to alter flowering behavior, or whether these responses vary within or among closely related species in patterns that indicate that the variability has been shaped by past selection.…”

Section: Major Patterns Alternate Explanations and Future Directionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing Responses to Changing Seasons: Natural Variation in the Plasticity of Flowering Time

Blackman

2016

Plant Physiol.

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For plants that live in seasonally changing environments, timing is everything. Matching developmental transitions with the best times of year for growth and reproduction is necessary to maintain high fitness. Consequently, plants employ many mechanisms to sense and integrate multiple predictive seasonal cues to regulate their major developmental shifts. As the annual timing with which the growing season starts and ends changes across the landscape, natural selection has led to the evolution of the mechanisms that regulate the developmental plasticity of flowering among populations or varieties of species and crop plants that inhabit broad geographic ranges. There has been significant recent progress in describing the diversity of this variation in flowering time plasticity and in identifying the specific genetic changes responsible. Such work is an essential step toward understanding the processes that have shaped current and past adaptation, managing genetic diversity and improving crops in the face of climate change, and forecasting how populations may respond plastically and evolutionarily to future environmental challenges. In this Update, I review the findings of recent studies of natural variation in the plasticity of flowering to photoperiod, vernalization, and ambient temperature, and the implications and open questions raised by this work are considered.A fundamental adaptation of plants inhabiting seasonal environments is their ability to match the annual timing of major life history transitions to the local growing season. Most species achieve this synchrony through developmental plasticity. In other words, individuals sense how environmental cues like daylength and temperature change from winter to spring to summer to fall. The information gleaned from these cycles is then integrated molecularly so that germination, flowering, and other key transitions occur during periods favorable for growth, reproduction, and seed set. However, as the climate changes over the 21st century and the relative timing of annual cycles in temperature and precipitation shifts, once adaptive responses will no longer effectively predict the best calendar dates to initiate these essential developmental events (Nicotra et al., 2010;Wilczek et al., 2010). Because natural populations and cultivated landraces of many taxa have evolved to thrive in geographically diverse habitats and climates as their ranges have expanded, they harbor natural variants that may prove instructive in breeding crops and conserving native plant diversity in the face of future environmental challenges. Thus, a critical objective in plant biology is

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“…As illustrated by Kobayashi et al . (), the inclusion of molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics has the potential to shed light on long‐standing questions of ecological concern.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Kobayashi et al . () provide a practical demonstration of applying the principles of systems biology [a holistic approach to studying the functional interactions in an effort to discover emerging properties of an organism or species] to understand ecological function. As an initial attempt in this direction, the authors demonstrate that they were able to link temperature and moisture conditions to transcript profiles and correlatively to mass flowering in S. beccariana .…”

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confidence: 99%

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Extending the Arabidopsis flowering paradigm to a mass flowering phenomenon in the tropics

2013

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Flowering time is a critical life history trait, one that is shaped by evolution to maximize fecundity, reproductive success and fitness (Amasino ). This is especially true of annual plants where the cycle of floral initiation, pollination and seed production occur at regular intervals to ensure the survival of the species. In long‐lived perennials, however, flowering can be an intermittent phenomenon and thus a challenge to understand. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Kobayashi et al. () tackle this particular challenge by applying modern‐day molecular techniques to the ‘spectacular and mysterious’ mass flowering that takes places in mixed dipterocarp forests of South‐East Asia. Here, amidst an almost unimaginable diversity of forbs, shrubs and trees, these authors used next‐generation sequencing technology to characterize what they refer to as the ‘ecological transcriptome’ in an attempt to glimpse into the functional genomic reprogramming of Shorea beccariana at pre‐ and postflowering developmental transitions. They encountered many of the challenges that are often underappreciated yet typical for tropical ecological research including sample collection within a ~40‐m high tree canopy, unpredictable flowering intervals and determining the most appropriate preflowering state for sampling. Despite these challenges, the authors were able to integrate gene ontology relationships with gene‐clustering algorithms and environmental data to support the hypothesis that drought is a key trigger for flowering in S. beccariana. The cloning and transgenic expression of selected S. beccariana genes to corroborate presumed protein function is a key feature of their work and seldom applied within an ecological framework. As illustrated by Kobayashi et al. (), the inclusion of molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics has the potential to shed light on long‐standing questions of ecological concern.

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Mass flowering of the tropical tree Shorea beccariana was preceded by expression changes in flowering and drought‐responsive genes

Cited by 74 publications

References 62 publications

Editorial 2014

Editorial 2014

Changing Responses to Changing Seasons: Natural Variation in the Plasticity of Flowering Time

Extending the Arabidopsis flowering paradigm to a mass flowering phenomenon in the tropics

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