Vivian F. Irish Yale University, New Haven, CT. MADS box genes encode key transcriptional regulators that have been implicated in the control of various aspects of floral development, primarily through work carried out in Arabidopsis. We have embarked on a series of analyses to examine the extent to which gene duplication, regulatory diversification and differences in protein interactions have ...

MADS-box genes encode transcription factors in all eukaryotic organisms thus far studied. Plant MADS-box proteins contain a DNA-binding (M), an intervening (I), a Keratin-like (K) and a C-terminal C-domain, thus plant MADS-box proteins are of the MIKC type. In higher plants most of the well-characterized genes are involved in floral development. They control the transition from vegetative to ge...

Regulation of flowering time is best understood in the dicot model species Arabidopsis thaliana. Molecular analyses revealed that genes belonging to the MADS box transcription factor family play pivotal regulatory roles in both the vernalization- and photoperiod-regulated flowering pathways. Here the analysis of three APETALA1 (AP1)-like MADS box proteins (LpMADS1-3) and a SHORT VEGETATIVE PHAS...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new way of choosing directions for the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) class of algorithms. The advantages of this new ORTHOMADS instantiation of MADS are that the polling directions are chosen deterministically, ensuring that the results of a given run are repeatable, and that they are orthogonal to each other, therefore the convex cones of missed...

The developmental transition to flowering is timed by endogenous and environmental signals through multiple genetic pathways. In Arabidopsis, the MADS-domain protein FLOWERING LOCUS C is a potent flowering repressor. Here, we report that the FLOWERING LOCUS C clade member MADS AFFECTING FLOWERING3 acts redundantly with another clade member to directly repress expression of the florigen FLOWERIN...

Abstract: A previous analysis of second-order behavior of pattern search algorithms for unconstrained and linearly constrained minimization is extended to the more general class of mesh adaptive direct search (MADS) algorithms for general constrained optimization. Because of the ability of MADS to generate an asymptotically dense set of search directions, we are able to establish reasonable con...

Gibberellin (GA), a diterpene hormone, plays diverse roles in plant growth and development, including seed germination, stem elongation, and flowering time. Although it is known that GA accelerates flowering through degradation of transcription repressors, DELLAs, the underlying mechanism is poorly understood. We show here that DELLA directly binds to microRNA156 (miR156)-targeted SQUAMOSA PROM...

The MADS-box genes of land plants are extensively diverged to form a superfamily and are important in various aspects of development including the specification of floral organs as homeotic selector genes. The closest relatives of land plants are the freshwater green algae charophyceans. To study the origin and evolution of land plant MADS-box genes, we characterized these genes in three charop...

The MADS-box transcription factors play essential roles in various processes of plant growth and development. In the present study, phylogenetic analysis of 142 apple MADS-box proteins with that of other dicotyledonous species identified six putative Dormancy-Associated MADS-box (DAM) and four putative Flowering Locus C-like (FLC-like) proteins. In order to study the expression of apple MADS-bo...