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Science 303 (5664): 1640-1644

Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

The Wheat VRN2 Gene Is a Flowering Repressor Down-Regulated by Vernalization

Liuling Yan,1* Artem Loukoianov,1 Ann Blechl,2 Gabriela Tranquilli,1{dagger} Wusirika Ramakrishna,3 Phillip SanMiguel,4 Jeffrey L. Bennetzen,5 Viviana Echenique,1{ddagger} Jorge Dubcovsky1*§

Abstract: Plants with a winter growth habit flower earlier when exposed for several weeks to cold temperatures, a process called vernalization. We report here the positional cloning of the wheat vernalization gene VRN2, a dominant repressor of flowering that is down-regulated by vernalization. Loss of function of VRN2, whether by natural mutations or deletions, resulted in spring lines, which do not require vernalization to flower. Reduction of the RNA level of VRN2 by RNA interference accelerated the flowering time of transgenic winter-wheat plants by more than a month.

1 Department of Agronomy and Range Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
2 U.S. Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service, Albany, CA 94710, USA.
3 Department of Biological Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA.
4 Purdue University Genomics Core, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
5 Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.

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* These authors contributed equally to this work.

{dagger} Present address: Instituto Recursos Biológicos, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia Agropecuaria, (1712) Castelar, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

{ddagger} Present address: Consejo Nacional Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas Departamento de Agronomía, Universidad Nacional del Sur, 8000 Bahía Blanca, Argentina.

§ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jdubcovsky{at}ucdavis.edu

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