Steep environmental gradients provide ideal settings for studies of potentially adaptive phenotypic and genetic variation in plants. The accurate timing of flowering is crucial for reproductive success and is regulated by several pathways, including the vernalization pathway. Among the numerous genes known to enable flowering in response to vernalization, the most prominent is FLOWERING LOCUS C...

Flowering time is an important agronomic trait, and wide variation exists among Brassica rapa. In Arabidopsis, FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) plays an important role in modulating flowering time and the response to vernalization. Brassica rapa contains several paralogues of FLC at syntenic regions. BrFLC2 maps under a major flowering time and vernalization response quantitative trait locus (QTL) at th...

Steep environmental gradients provide ideal settings for studies of potentially adaptive phenotypic and genetic variation in plants. The accurate timing of flowering is crucial for reproductive success and is regulated by several pathways, including the vernalization pathway. Among the numerous genes known to enable flowering in response to vernalization, the most prominent is FLOWERING LOCUS C...

After the f loral transition the shoot apical meristem (SAM) changes its identity switching from vegetative to reproductive. In annual Arabidopsis ecotypes, the transition to f lowering is strongly promoted by variations in day length (photoperiod). The photoperiodic pathway promotes f lowering when Arabidopsis plants are exposed to long days (LDs) conditions (typical of spring and summer). Pho...

Timing of flowering is a reproductive trait that has significant impact on fitness in plants. In contrast to recent advances in understanding the molecular basis of floral transition, few empirical studies have addressed questions concerning population processes of flowering time diversification within species. We analyzed chloroplast DNA genealogical structure of flowering time variation in ce...

In many plant species, the duration of the daily exposure to light (photoperiod) provides a seasonal cue that helps to adjust flowering time to the most favourable time of the year. In Arabidopsis thaliana, the core mechanism of acceleration of flowering by long days involves the stabilisation of the CONSTANS (CO) protein by light reaching the leaves, the direct induction of the expression of F...

BACKGROUND The transition from vegetative to reproductive stages marks a major milestone in plant development. It is clear that global change factors (e.g., increasing [CO(2)] and temperature) have already had and will continue to have a large impact on plant flowering times in the future. Increasing atmospheric [CO(2)] has recently been shown to affect flowering time, and may produce even grea...

Understanding the genetic basis of natural phenotypic variation is of great importance, particularly since selection can act on this variation to cause evolution. We examined expression and allelic variation in candidate flowering time loci in Brassica rapa plants derived from a natural population and showing a broad range in the timing of first flowering. The loci of interest were orthologs of...

characterized (Koornneef et al. 1991, 1998b, Lee et al, 1993, Araki and Komeda 1993, Clarke and Dean 1994, Clarke et al. 1995, Eimert et al. 1995, Zagotta et al. 1992, Sung et al. 1992, Martinez-Zapater et al. 1994, Sanda and Amasino 1996a, Amasino 1996, Levy and Dean 1998). Although they caused similar mutant phenotypes, diflbrent late-flowering mutants characterized responded to environmental...