Flowering at the appropriate time of year is essential for successful reproduction in plants. We found that HAP3b in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), a putative CCAAT-binding transcription factor gene, is involved in controlling flowering time. Overexpression of HAP3b promotes early flowering while hap3b, a null mutant of HAP3b, is delayed in flowering under a long-day photoperiod. Under sho...

Plant phenology is known to depend on many different environmental variables, but soil microbial communities have rarely been acknowledged as possible drivers of flowering time. Here, we tested separately the effects of four naturally occurring soil microbiomes and their constituent soil chemistries on flowering phenology and reproductive fitness of Boechera stricta, a wild relative of Arabidop...

* Flowering is a critical stage in plant life cycles, and changes might alter processes at the species, community and ecosystem levels. Therefore, likely flowering-time responses to global change drivers are needed for predictions of global change impacts on natural and managed ecosystems. * Here, the impact of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) (550 micromol mol(-1)) and warming (+...

A moderate change in ambient temperature significantly affects plant physiology including flowering time. MiR399 and its target gene PHOSPHATE 2 (PHO2) are known to play a role in the maintenance of phosphate homeostasis. However, the regulation of flowering time by the miR399-PHO2 module has not been investigated. As we have previously identified miR399 as an ambient temperature-responsive miR...

In this study flowering time and other important morphologic traits were evaluated during two years in F1 almond progenies of seventy two seedlings from cross between the intermediate flowering Italian cultivar ‘Tuono’ and the extra-late blooming Iranian cultivar ‘Shahrood-12’. A modified-bulk segregant analysis in combination with the application of the 140 RAPD primers, 87 nuclear ...

In a previous study, we identified a candidate fragment length polymorphism associated with flowering time variation after seven generations of selection for flowering time, starting from the maize inbred line F252. Here, we characterized the candidate region and identified underlying polymorphisms. Then, we combined QTL mapping, association mapping, and developmental characterization to dissec...

Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) accessions provide an excellent resource to dissect the molecular basis of adaptation. We have selected 192 Arabidopsis accessions collected to represent worldwide and local variation and analyzed two adaptively important traits, flowering time and vernalization response. There was huge variation in the flowering habit of the different accessions, with no simp...