Yan Fei-Hong, Zhang Li-Ping, Cheng Fang, Yu Dong-Mei, Hu Jin-Yong
CAS Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650201, China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Plant Divers. 2020 Jun 12;43(1):78-85. doi: 10.1016/j.pld.2020.05.004. eCollection 2021 Feb.
Flowering time, a key transition point from vegetative to reproductive growth, is regulated by an intrinsic complex of endogenous and exogenous signals including nutrient status. For hundreds of years, nitrogen has been well known to modulate flowering time, but the molecular genetic basis on how plants adapt to ever-changing nitrogen availability remains not fully explored. Here we explore how Arabidopsis natural variation in flowering time responds to nitrate fluctuation. Upon nitrate availability change, we detect accession- and photoperiod-specific flowering responses, which also feature a accession-specific dependency on growth traits. The flowering time variation correlates well with the expression of floral integrators, and , in an accession-specific manner. We find that gene expression variation of key hub genes in the photoperiod-circadian-clock (), aging (s) and autonomous () pathways associates with the expression change of these integrators, hence flowering time variation. Our results thus shed light on the molecular genetic mechanisms on regulation of accession- and photoperiod-specific flowering time variation in response to nitrate availability.
开花时间是从营养生长向生殖生长转变的关键转折点，它受包括营养状况在内的内源性和外源性信号的内在复合体调控。数百年来，人们早已知道氮能调节开花时间，但植物如何适应不断变化的氮供应的分子遗传基础仍未得到充分探索。在这里，我们探究拟南芥开花时间的自然变异如何响应硝酸盐波动。在硝酸盐供应发生变化时，我们检测到了不同生态型和光周期特异性的开花反应，这些反应还具有对生长性状的生态型特异性依赖性。开花时间变异与开花整合因子 和 的表达密切相关，且具有生态型特异性。我们发现，光周期昼夜节律（）、衰老（s）和自主（）途径中关键枢纽基因的基因表达变异与这些整合因子的表达变化相关，进而与开花时间变异相关。因此，我们的结果揭示了响应硝酸盐供应时调控生态型和光周期特异性开花时间变异的分子遗传机制。
