Flowering plants produce floral meristems in response to intrinsic and extrinsic flowering inductive signals. In Arabidopsis, the floral meristem identity genes LEAFY (LFY) and APETALA1 (AP1) are activated to play a pivotal role in specifying floral meristems during floral transition. We show here that the emerging floral meristems require AP1 to partly specify their floral identities by direct...

The transition from vegetative to reproductive growth in perennial woody plants does not occur until after several years of repeated seasonal changes and alternative growth. To better understand the molecular basis of flowering regulation in citrus, a MADS-box gene was isolated from trifoliate orange (precocious trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata L. Raf.). Sequence alignment and phylogeneti...

A novel gene that is involved in regulating flower initiation and development has been identified in Arabidopsis. This gene has been designated UNUSUAL FLORAL ORGANS (UFO), with five corresponding nuclear recessive alleles designated ufo[middot]1 to ufo[middot]5. Under short day-length conditions, ufo homozygotes generate more coflorescences than do the wild type, and coflorescences often appea...

Gene expression and regulation in eukaryotes is controlled by orchestrated binding of regulatory proteins, including both activators and repressors, to promoters and other cis-regulatory DNA elements. An increasing number of plant genomes have been sequenced; however, a similar effort to the ENCODE project, which aimed to identify all functional elements in the human genome, has yet to be initi...

Basic questions regarding the origin and evolution of grass (Poaceae) inflorescence morphology remain unresolved, including the developmental genetic basis for evolution of the highly derived outer spikelet organs. To evaluate homologies between the outer sterile organs of grass spikelets and inflorescence structures of nongrass monocot flowers, we describe expression patterns of APETALA1/FRUIT...

Flowering (inflorescence formation) of the grass Lolium temulentum is strictly regulated, occurring rapidly on exposure to a single long day (LD). During floral induction, L. temulentum differs significantly from dicot species such as Arabidopsis in the expression, at the shoot apex, of two APETALA1 (AP1)-like genes, LtMADS1 and LtMADS2, and of L. temulentum LEAFY (LtLFY). As shown by in situ h...

Ethylene is a major plant hormone that plays an important role in regulating bolting, although the underlying molecular mechanism is not well understood. In this study, we report the novel finding that the serine-62 (Ser-62) phosphorylation of Ethylene Response Factor110 (ERF110) is involved in the regulation of bolting time. The gene expression and posttranslational modification (phosphorylati...

RICE FLOWERING LOCUS T 1 (RFT1/FT-L3) is the closest homologue of Heading date 3a (Hd3a), which is thought to encode a mobile flowering signal and promote floral transition under short-day (SD) conditions. RFT1 is located only 11.5 kb from Hd3a on chromosome 6. Although RFT1 RNAi plants flowered normally, double RFT1-Hd3a RNAi plants did not flower up to 300 days after sowing (DAS), indicating ...

We have compared the gene expression profiles of inflorescences of the floral homeotic mutants apetala1, apetala2, apetala3, pistillata, and agamous with that of wild-type plants using a flower-specific cDNA microarray and a whole genome oligonucleotide array. By combining the data sets from the individual mutant/wild type comparisons, we were able to identify a large number of genes that are, ...