Toward functional characterization of <i>Triticum aestivum WFCA</i>-coding sequences

Description

<p>Flowering is a critical step in the plant life cycle. If flowering occurs too early or
too late, seed production suffers. Flowering is regulated through numerous flowering
repressors. As long as these repressors persist, the plant will remain in a vegetative
growth stage. Some plants possess two separate genetic pathways, the autonomous
pathway and the vernalization pathway, that promote the transition to flowering through
stable downregulation of flowering repressors. Once the plant achieves floral
competence, it will flower under inductive environmental conditions.</p>
<p>In <i>Arabidopsis</i>, <i>FCA</i> is a key autonomous pathway gene, acting with <i>FY</i> to
promote the floral transition. Recently, gene sequences resembling <i>FCA</i> were cloned
from hexaploid wheat (<i>Triticum aestivum</i>) and designated as <i>WFCA</i>. WFCA shows
numerous similarities to the FCA peptide, especially regarding three key regions: two
RNA Recognition Motifs and the WW domain. This study seeks to determine if <i>WFCA</i>
genes function similar to <i>FCA</i> by determining if they are able to complement the <i>fca-1</i>
mutant of <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i>.</p>
<p>T1 progeny from an <i>Arabidopsis fca-1</i> plant transformed with <i>WFCA</i> were
grown without vernalization and assayed for the final leaf number (FLN). The late
flowering <i>fca-1</i> control plants bolted with an average FLN of 14.8 while the T1
population had an average FLN of 14.3. Although the numerical difference is slight, the
results are statistically significant, and suggest that <i>WFCA</i> genes may have some degree of flowering promotion activity in <i>Arabidopsis</i>. The lack of strong complementation
may be due to divergence of the <i>WFCA</i> genes from their <i>Arabidopsis</i> counterparts. With
increasing evidence for divergence in flowering promotion between monocot and dicot
species, the development of a robust monocot model system appears to be critical to
provide a good framework to assist studies of the particular nuances of the monocot
flowering process.</p>

Tags

Wheat

Flowering

FCA

WFCA

<i>Arabidopsis</i>

Floral Transition

Additional Fields

Identifer	oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:SSU.etd-07062012-103632
Date	06 July 2012
Creators	Hoffman, Travis L.
Contributors	Selvaraj, Gopalan, Fowler, D. Brian
Publisher	University of Saskatchewan
Source Sets	Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Language	English
Detected Language	English
Type	text
Format	application/pdf
Source	http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-07062012-103632/
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