Functional analysis of the Landsberg erecta allele of FRIGIDA

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Inga Schmalenbach¹  Malgorzata Ryngajllo¹  Lei Zhang¹  José M Jiménez-Gómez² 

[1] Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Carl-von-Linné-Weg 10, 50829, Cologne, Germany;Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Carl-von-Linné-Weg 10, 50829, Cologne, Germany;INRA, UMR1318, Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin, RD10, F-78000, Versailles, France;

关键词: Arabidopsis thaliana;    Flowering time;    FRIGIDA;    Vernalization;    Natural variation;    Allelic series;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12870-014-0218-2

 received in 2014-03-10, accepted in 2014-08-04,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundMost of the natural variation in flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana can be attributed to allelic variation at the gene FRIGIDA (FRI, AT4G00650), which activates expression of the floral repressor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC, AT5G10140). Usually, late-flowering accessions carry functional FRI alleles (FRI-wt), whereas early flowering accessions contain non-functional alleles. The two most frequent alleles found in early flowering accessions are the ones present in the commonly used lab strains Columbia (FRI-Col) and Landsberg erecta (FRI-Ler), which contain a premature stop codon and a deletion of the start codon respectively.ResultsAnalysis of flowering time data from various Arabidopsis natural accessions indicated that the FRI-Ler allele retains some functionality. We generated transgenic lines carrying the FRI-Col or FRI-Ler allele in order to compare their effect on flowering time, vernalization response and FLC expression in the same genetic background. We characterize their modes of regulation through allele-specific expression and their relevance in nature through re-analysis of published datasets. We demonstrate that the FRI-Ler allele induces FLC expression, delays flowering time and confers sensitivity to vernalization in contrast to the true null FRI-Col allele. Nevertheless, the FRI-Ler allele revealed a weaker effect when compared to the fully functional FRI-wt allele, mainly due to reduced expression.ConclusionsThe present study defines for the first time the existence of a new class of Arabidopsis accessions with an intermediate phenotype between slow and rapid cycling types. Although using available data from a common garden experiment we cannot observe fitness differences between accessions carrying the FRI-Ler or the FRI-Col allele, the phenotypic changes observed in the lab suggest that variation in these alleles could play a role in adaptation to specific natural environments.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Schmalenbach et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.