Abstract
Soybean (Glycine max) is a vital oilseed legume crop that provides protein and oil for humans and feedstock for animals. Flowering is a prerequisite for seed production. Floral transition, from vegetative to reproductive stage, in a plant, is regulated by environmental (light, temperature) and endogenous factors. In Arabidopsis, Flowering Locus T (FT) protein is shown to be a mobile signal that moves from leaf to shoot apical meristem to induce flowering. However, FTs role in soybean is not fully resolved due to the presence of multiple (ten) homologs in the genome. Two of the ten FT homologs (GmFT2a and GmFT5a) have a role in the floral transition while GmFT1a and GmFT4 suppress soybean flowering. Recent deep sequencing data revealed that six FT homologs are expressed in shoot apical meristem and leaves during floral transition. One FT homolog, GmFT7 showed strong expression during soybean floral transition. Though bioinformatic analyses revealed that GmFT7 had high similarity with GmFT2a, ectopic GmFT7 expression in Arabidopsis could not promote flowering or rescue the late-flowering phenotype of Arabidopsis ft-10 mutant.
Highlights
Soybean seed is one of the major sources of high-quality proteins and oil for human consumption and soybean seed meal for livestock feed
Flowering Locus T (FT) is a member of the Phosphatidylethanolamine-binding protein (PEBP) gene family encoding a 175 amino acids in Arabidopsis (AtFT)
A database search showed that GmFT7 (Glyma02g07650) has a CDS region of 195 bp, corresponding to 64 amino acids
Summary
Soybean seed is one of the major sources of high-quality proteins and oil for human consumption and soybean seed meal for livestock feed. Soybean flowering and seed maturity are determined by day length and temperatures during the growth and development stages. Maturity groups classification system (MGs) has been introduced to group soybean varieties based on their adaptation to specific environmental conditions. MGs IX and X are late flowering types and primarily grown in the southern U S3 Plants depend on their ability to measure the seasonal changes in photoperiod and ambient temperatures for their development and reproduction. The flowering time of day-neutral plants is not regulated by day length. Soybean is a short day (SD) plant implying floral induction will occur when plants are grown in a 12 h or less day length. Arabidopsis is an LD plant requiring the longer than a critical day length for flowering. CONSTANS (CO), a transcriptional regulator, integrates day length information in the flowering photoperiod pathway.
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