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Quantitative Modulation of Polycomb Silencing Underlies Natural Variation in Vernalization

2012; American Association for the Advancement of Science; Volume: 337; Issue: 6094 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1126/science.1221881

1095-9203

Vincent Coustham, Peijin Li, Amy Strange, Clare Lister, Jie Song, Caroline Dean,

Plant Gene Expression Analysis

Is Winter Past? Some plants are adapted to wait through the winter before their genetic programs for flowering are initiated. But the duration of winter varies with location, and thus, to avoid flowering too late into the summer or exposing blossoms to frost, the adaptation needs to hold the flowers off for just the right amount of time. Working with Arabidopsis thaliana , Coustham et al. (p. 584 , published online 12 July) identified a quantitative mechanism that “counts” off the duration of winter. FLC, a repressor of flowering, carries sequence polymorphisms that direct epigenetic events. Plants with fewer of these polymorphisms are adapted to short winters, and plants with all four polymorphisms are adapted to long winters.