Identification of a gene responsible for the 60-day delay in flowering time of Arabidopsis

Abstract

Identification of genes related to flowering-time in Arabidopsis is very important and meaningful contribution to the flowering process control. One late flowering mutant plant, which exhibits 60-day delay in flowering, was screened from Arabidopsis library of T-DNA insertion. Southern blotting was used to confirm the single copy of exogenetic T-DNA in the genome of the mutant. The flanking sequence of T-DNA insert was obtained by TAIL-PCR and then analyzed by BLAST to confirm that the insertion site locates at the sixth exon of AT2G19520.1 (FVE gene). FVE is considered as a classical flowering time gene in Arabidopsis. It is a component of the autonomous pathway that encodes AtMSI4, which is a putative retinoblastoma-associated protein. The late-flowering mutant is named as fve-4, which is similar to fve-3 of Columbia and allelic with fve-1 and fve-2 of Landsberg erecta. The fve-4 mutant’s delay of flowering was longer than that of fve-3 mutant, whose T-DNA insertion is located at the first exon of FVE gene, suggesting that the sixth exon of FVE gene may play a more important role in the control of floral transition.

Keywords

delay of flowering / FVE gene / Arabidopsis / gene identification

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg