Environmental control of flowering allows plant reproduction to occur under optimal conditions and facilitates adaptation to different locations. At high latitude, flowering of many plants is controlled by seasonal changes in day length. The photoperiodic flowering pathway confers this response in the Brassicaceae, which colonized temperate latitudes after divergence from the Cleomaceae, their ...

Eucalyptus trees are among the most important species for industrial forestry worldwide. However, as with most forest trees, flowering does not begin for one to several years after planting which can limit the rate of conventional and molecular breeding. To speed flowering, we transformed a Eucalyptus grandis × urophylla hybrid (SP7) with a variety of constructs that enable overexpression of FL...

From screening a population of Arabidopsis overexpression lines, two Arabidopsis genes were identified, EFO1 (early flowering by overexpression 1) and EFO2, that confer early flowering when overexpressed. The two genes encode putative WD-domain proteins which share high sequence similarity and constitute a small subfamily. Interestingly, the efo2-1 loss-of-function mutant also flowered earlier ...

Flowering is an essential stage of plant growth and development. The successful transition to flowering not only ensures the completion of plant life cycles, it also serves as the basis for the production of economically important seeds and fruits. CONSTANS (CO) and FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) are two genes playing critical roles in flowering time control in Arabidopsis. Through homology-based cloni...

Environmental control of flowering allows plant reproduction to occur under optimal conditions and facilitates adaptation to different locations. At high latitude, flowering of many plants is controlled by seasonal changes in day length. The photoperiodic flowering pathway confers this response in the Brassicaceae, which colonized temperate latitudes after divergence from the Cleomaceae, their ...

FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and TERMINAL FLOWER1 (TFL1) proteins share highly conserved amino acid residues but they play opposite regulatory roles in promoting and repressing the flowering response, respectively. Previous substitution models and functional analysis have identified several key amino acid residues which are critical for the promotion of flowering. However, the precise relationship be...

Determinacy and photoperiod insensitivity are agronomically important traits, selected during or after domestication in common bean. Determinacy reduces aboveground plant biomass and accelerates and synchronizes flowering. Photoperiod insensitivity allows common bean to be grown at higher latitudes under long days. In this study, we attempted to identify Phaseolus vulgaris homologues of 12 Arab...

Flowering is indicative of the transition from vegetative to reproductive phase, a critical event in the life cycle of plants. In soybean (Glycine max), a flowering quantitative trait locus, FT2, corresponding to the maturity locus E2, was detected in recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from the varieties "Misuzudaizu" (ft2/ft2; JP28856) and "Moshidou Gong 503" (FT2/FT2; JP27603). A map-bas...

The identification of FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and several FT homologs as phloem-mobile proteins that regulate flowering has sparked the search for additional homologs involved in the long-distance regulation of other developmental processes. Given that flowering and tuber induction share regulatory pathways, the quest for long-distance tuberization signals has been further stimulated. Several tu...

In inducing photoperiodic conditions, plants produce a signal dubbed "florigen" in leaves. Florigen moves through the phloem to the shoot apical meristem (SAM) where it induces flowering. In Arabidopsis, the FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) protein acts as a component of this phloem-mobile signal. However whether the transportable FT mRNA also contributes to systemic florigen signalling remains to be elu...