The Wheat VRN2 Gene Is a Flowering Repressor Down-Regulated by Vernalization

By Liuling Yan, A. Loukoianov, A. Blechl, G. Tranquilli, W. Ramakrishna, P. SanMiguel, Jeffrey Bennetzen, V. Echenique, J. Dubcovsky. Science, 2004

1,059 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Plants with a winter growth habit flower earlier when exposed for several weeks to cold temperatures, a process called vernalization. We report here the positional cloning of the wheat vernalization gene VRN2, a dominant repressor of flowering that is down-regulated by vernalization. Loss of function of VRN2, whether by natural mutations or deletions, resulted in spring lines, which do not require vernalization to flower. Reduction of the RNA level of VRN2 by RNA interference accelerated the flowering time of transgenic winter-wheat plants by more than a month.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f353364766394f015200309188585bde17ca781

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In Molecular Biology

1. G. Coupland
2. M. Schmid
3. R. Amasino
4. F. Turck
5. Anusha Srikanth
6. T. Mitchell-Olds
7. P. Rey
8. C. Schwartz

In Plant Science

1. J. Dubcovsky
2. M. Sorrells
3. G. Coupland
4. M. Schmid
5. R. Amasino
6. S. Chao
7. G. Bai
8. P. Monneveux

Citations in the corpus

• A Pseudo-Response Regulator is misexpressed in the photoperiod insensitive Ppd-D1a mutant of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) (2007, background): “PRR genes are distantly related to other CCT domain genes important in Xowering control, namely the CONSTANS-like family of transcription factors (Robson et al. 2001; GriYths et al. 2003) and the wheat vernalization gene VRN2 (Yan et al. 2004).”
• Natural Variation of Flowering Time and Vernalization Responsiveness in Brachypodium distachyon (2010, background): “Allelic variation at VRN2 is often responsible for the difference in vernalization requirement in winter versus spring varieties [6].”
• Molecular characterization of the allelic variation at the VRN-H2 vernalization locus in barley (2005, methodology): “Hybridization of the 11 mutant lines with a probe for the single copy gene SNF2P, located 13.1 kb distal to ZCCT-1 in Triticum monococcum ( Yan et al. 2004 ) confirmed that there was a problem with these mutant lines (Figure 3c).”
• Ghd7 (Ma6) Represses Sorghum Flowering in Long Days: Ghd7 Alleles Enhance Biomass Accumulation and Grain Production (2014, background): “, 2008), wheat (Yan et al., 2004; Distelfeld and Dubcovsky, 2010), and barley (Trevaskis et al.”
• Large deletions within the first intron in VRN-1 are associated with spring growth habit in barley and wheat (2005, background): “…revealed that VRN-1 encodes a MADS-box transcription factor that is orthologous to the Arabidopsis meristem identity gene APETALA1 (Yan et al. 2003), while the VRN-2 gene codes for a zinc finger-CCT domain transcription factor with no clear orthologues in Arabidopsis or rice (Yan et al. 2004b).”
• Cultivated einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum L. subsp. monococcum): the long life of a founder crop of agriculture (2014, methodology): “Einkorn has been successfully used for gene discovery in subgenome map-based cloning approaches, for the cloning of the leaf rust resistance gene Lr10 (Stein et al. 2000; Feuillet et al. 2003), the vernalisation genes VRN1 and VRN2 (Yan et al. 2003, 2004), the domestication locus Q (Faris et al. 200”
• Opportunities and challenges of speed breeding: A review (2021, background): “In winter wheat, vernalization or cold temperature stress is required at the vegetative stage to accelerate the transition to the reproductive stage (Dubcovsky et al., 2006; Yan et al., 2004).”
• Regulatory genes involved in the determination of frost tolerance in temperate cereals (2009, background): “It is currently not known if VRN2 can repress VRN1 independently of VRN3 and also if vernalization can regulate VRN2 independently of VRN1.”
• Regulation of flowering time: all roads lead to Rome (2011, background): “In wheat, for example, vernalization was found to regulate the expression of ZCCT1 (and ZCCT2), a protein that harbors a CCT domain related the one found in CO-like proteins [111].”