Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Sci. STKE, 9 December 2003
Vol. 2003, Issue 212, p. tw482
[DOI: 10.1126/stke.2122003TW482]

EDITORS' CHOICE

PLANT BIOLOGY Controlling When to Make Flowers

Flowering time in plants is regulated in part by environmental cues, such as changes in day length, but plants may also begin to flower under direction from their autonomous regulatory pathway. He et al. (see the Perspective by Bastow and Dean) have now shown that one of the autonomous pathway genes, flowering locus D (FLD), is a homolog of a protein found in mammalian histone deacetylase complexes. FLD helps to regulate the acetylation status of the chromatin around the flowering locus C (FLC) gene, which encodes a transcription factor that blocks the floral transition. FLD-induced deacetylation of FLC increases its expression and leads to an extreme delay in flowering time.

Y. He, S. D. Michaels, R. M. Amasino, Regulation of flowering time by histone acetylation in Arabidopsis. Science 302, 1751-1754 (2003). [Abstract] [Full Text]

R. Bastow, C. Dean, Deciding when to flower. Science 302, 1695-1696 (2003). [Summary] [Full Text]

Citation: Controlling When to Make Flowers. Sci. STKE 2003, tw482 (2003).

To Advertise     Find Products

Science Signaling. ISSN 1937-9145 (online), 1945-0877 (print). Pre-2008: Science's STKE. ISSN 1525-8882