Shade avoidance in higher plants is regulated by the action of multiple phytochrome (phy) species that detect changes in the red/far-red ratio (R/FR) of incident light and initiate a redirection of growth and an acceleration of flowering. The phyB mutant of Arabidopsis is constitutively elongated and early flowering and displays attenuated responses to both reduced R/FR and end-of-day far-red l...

Extensive natural variation has been described for the timing of flowering initiation in many annual plants, including the model wild species Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), which is presumed to be involved in adaptation to different climates. However, the environmental factors that might shape this genetic variation, as well as the molecular bases of climatic adaptation by modifications of...

The einkorn wheat mutant mvp-1 (maintained vegetative phase 1) has a non-flowering phenotype caused by deletions including, but not limited to, the genes CYS, PHYC, and VRN1. However, the impact of these deletions on global gene expression is still unknown. Transcriptome analysis showed that these deletions caused the upregulation of several pathogenesis-related (PR) and jasmonate-responsive ge...

The Arabidopsis thaliana phyB, phyD, and phyE phytochrome apoproteins show higher amino acid sequence similarity to each other than to phyA or phyC, they are the most recently evolved members of this photoreceptor family, and they may interact in regulating photomorphogenesis. The expression patterns of translational fusions of the 5' upstream regions of the PHYB, PHYD, and PHYE genes to the be...

A large genetic screen for sos (for salt overly sensitive) mutants was performed in an attempt to isolate mutations in any gene with an sos phenotype. Our search yielded 28 new alleles of sos1, nine mutant alleles of a newly identified locus, SOS2, and one allele of a third salt tolerance locus, SOS3. The sos2 mutations, which are recessive, were mapped to the lower arm of chromosome V, approxi...

The PHYD gene of the Wassilewskija (Ws) ecotype of Arabidopsis contains a 14-bp deletion (the phyD-1 mutation) beginning at amino acid 29 of the reading frame, resulting in translation termination at a nonsense codon 138 nucleotides downstream of the deletion end point. Immunoblot analyses showed that Ws lacks phyD but contains normal levels of phyA, phyB, and phyC. By backcrossing into the Ws ...

The eudicot order Malpighiales contains ∼16000 species and is the most poorly resolved large rosid clade. To clarify phylogenetic relationships in the order, we used maximum likelihood, Bayesian, and parsimony analyses of DNA sequence data from 13 gene regions, totaling 15604 bp, and representing all three genomic compartments (i.e., plastid: atpB, matK, ndhF, and rbcL; mitochondrial: ccmB, cob...