Isolation and functional characterization of JcFT, a FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) homologous gene from the biofuel plant Jatropha curcas

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Li Luo¹  Zeng-Fu Xu²  Qiantang Fu²  Longjian Niu³  Chaoqiong Li⁴ 

[1] Key Laboratory of Gene Engineering of the Ministry of Education, and State Key Laboratory for Biocontrol, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, 510275, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China;Key Laboratory of Tropical Plant Resources and Sustainable Use, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 666303, Menglun, Yunnan, China;Key Laboratory of Tropical Plant Resources and Sustainable Use, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 666303, Menglun, Yunnan, China;School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, 230027, Hefei, Anhui, China;Key Laboratory of Tropical Plant Resources and Sustainable Use, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 666303, Menglun, Yunnan, China;University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China;

关键词: Biofuel;    Early flowering;    Florigen;    FLOWERING LOCUS T;    Physic nut;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2229-14-125

 received in 2013-12-13, accepted in 2014-05-02,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPhysic nut (Jatropha curcas L.) is a potential feedstock for biofuel production because Jatropha oil is highly suitable for the production of the biodiesel and bio-jet fuels. However, Jatropha exhibits low seed yield as a result of unreliable and poor flowering. FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) –like genes are important flowering regulators in higher plants. To date, the flowering genes in Jatropha have not yet been identified or characterized.ResultsTo better understand the genetic control of flowering in Jatropha, an FT homolog was isolated from Jatropha and designated as JcFT. Sequence analysis and phylogenetic relationship of JcFT revealed a high sequence similarity with the FT genes of Litchi chinensis, Populus nigra and other perennial plants. JcFT was expressed in all tissues of adult plants except young leaves, with the highest expression level in female flowers. Overexpression of JcFT in Arabidopsis and Jatropha using the constitutive promoter cauliflower mosaic virus 35S or the phloem-specific promoter Arabidopsis SUCROSE TRANSPORTER 2 promoter resulted in an extremely early flowering phenotype. Furthermore, several flowering genes downstream of JcFT were up-regulated in the JcFT-overexpression transgenic plant lines.ConclusionsJcFT may encode a florigen that acts as a key regulator in flowering pathway. This study is the first to functionally characterize a flowering gene, namely, JcFT, in the biofuel plant Jatropha.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Li 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/2.0), 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.