Abstract

Flowering is a critical event in the life cycle of plants; the WRKY-type transcription factors are reported to be involved in many developmental processes sunch as trichome development and epicuticular wax loading, but whether they are involved in flowering time regulation is still unknown. Within this study, we provide clear evidence that GsWRKY20, a member of WRKY gene family from wild soybean, is involved in controlling plant flowering time. Expression of GsWRKY20 was abundant in the shoot tips and inflorescence meristems of wild soybean. Phenotypic analysis showed that GsWRKY20 over-expression lines flowered earlier than the wild-type plants under all conditions: long-day and short-day photoperiods, vernalization, or exogenous GA3 application, indicating that GsWRKY20 may mainly be involved in an autonomous flowering pathway. Further analyses by qRT-PCR and microarray suggests that GsWRKY20 accelerating plant flowering might primarily be through the regulation of flowering-related genes (i.e., FLC, FT, SOC1 and CO) and floral meristem identity genes (i.e., AP1, SEP3, AP3, PI and AG). Our results provide the evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of manipulating GsWRKY20 for altering plant flowering time.

Highlights

  • In higher plants, a phase transition from vegetative to reproductive development is one of the most important events in their life history [1,2]

  • Some studies have shown that the expression levels of FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), CO, SUPPRESSOR OF OVEREXPRESSION OF CO 1 (SOC1) and FT in Arabidopsis exhibit different during the flowering transition stage [2,3], so we further analyzed the expression of these four flowering integrator genes in the wild type (WT) plants and GsWRKY20ox plants under different growing days by quantitative real-time RTPCR (qRT-PCR), and the results showed that the expression levels of FLC, CO, SOC1 and FT in WT and GsWRKY20ox plants exhibited different during the flowering transition stage, the flowering repressor FLC was down-regulated and the flowering activators CO, Figure 4

  • We found that GsWRKY20 acts as a positive regulator of flowering, since the transgenic plants over-expressing GsWRKY20 demonstrated early flowering compared to WT

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Summary

Introduction

A phase transition from vegetative to reproductive development is one of the most important events in their life history [1,2]. This transition is tightly coordinated through a diverse array of signaling networks that integrate various endogenous and exogenous signals [3]. An endogenous pathway that adds plant age to the control of flowering time has been described [6]. Several genes, such as CONSTANS (CO), FLOWERING

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