SnapShot: Control of flowering in Arabidopsis.

By F. Fornara, Amaury de Montaigu, G. Coupland. Cell, 2010

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Plants initiate flowering after a period of vegetative development. During this process, called floral induction, the shoot apical meristem starts to produce flowers instead of leaves. The timing of floral induction is controlled by sophisticated regulatory networks that monitor changes in the environment, ensuring that flowering occurs under conditions most likely to maximize reproductive success and seed production. In the model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana ? 180 genes have been implicated in flowering-time control based on isolation of loss-of-function mutations or analysis of transgenic plants. This SnapShot presents a subset of these genes and proteins, each organized according to its spatial activity in the leaves or the shoot apical meristem of the plant. Strikingly, several genes act more than once and in several tissues during floral induction. Many of these genes occur in a network of six major pathways: the photoperiod and vernalization pathways control flowering in response to seasonal changes in day length and temperature; the ambient temperature pathway responds to daily growth temperatures; and the age, autonomous, and gibberellin pathways act more independently of environmental stimuli. The six pathways converge to regulate a small number of “floral integrator genes,” encoded by different classes of proteins, which govern flowering time by merging signals from multiple pathways. These integrator genes include FLOWERING LOCUS T ( FT ) and SUPPRESSOR OF OVEREXPRESSION OF CONSTANS 1 ( SOC1 ), which both rapidly promote floral development. In addition, responses to other environmental stimuli, such as the balance of different wavelengths of light or nutrient availability, also influence flowering time, but how these processes interact with the pathways described here is not fully understood. All genes that we identified from the literature as being implicated in flowering-time control are listed at http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/english/research/couplandGroup/ coupland/floweringgenes/index.html.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

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