Abstract

Flowering time control is critically important for the reproductive accomplishment of higher plants as floral transition can be affected by both environmental and endogenous signals. Flowering Locus T-like (FTL) genes are major genetic determinants of flowering in plants. In rice, 13 OsFTL genes have been annotated in the genome and amongst them, Hd3a (OsFTL2) and RFT1 (OsFTL3) have been studied extensively and their functions are confirmed as central florigens that control rice flowering under short day and long day environment, respectively. In this report, a rice OsFTL gene, OsFTL10, was characterized, and its function on flowering and abiotic stress was investigated. The expression level of OsFTL10 was high in young seedlings and shown to be induced by GA3 and drought stress. Overexpression of OsFTL10 resulted in earlier flowering in rice plants by up to 2 weeks, through up-regulation of the downstream gene OsMADS15. OsFTL10 also regulated Ehd1 and OsMADS51 through a feedback mechanism. The OsFTL10 protein was also detected in both nucleus and cytoplasm. Furthermore, yeast two hybrid (Y2H) and bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) results show that OsFTL10 could interact with multiple 14-3-3s, suggesting that OsFTL10 might function in a similar way to Hd3a in promoting rice flowering by forming a FAC complex with 14-3-3, and OsFD1. Further experiments revealed that constitutive expression of OsFTL10 improved the drought tolerance of transgenic plants by stimulating the expression of drought responsive genes. These results suggest that rice FTL genes might function in flowering promotion and responses to environmental signals.

Highlights

  • Flowering is one of the most important physiological processes that changes the vegetative and reproductive growth of plants

  • We studied the expression of OsFTL10 and found that it expressed at a higher level in young leaf, and its expression can be induced by drought stress

  • As abscisic acid (ABA) and mannitol are related to drought stress, we further studied the drought tolerance of OsFTL10 transgenic plants in addition to its function in flowering

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Summary

Introduction

Flowering is one of the most important physiological processes that changes the vegetative and reproductive growth of plants. Advances in the molecular genetics of Arabidopsis and rice, have revealed the molecular nature of florigen to be a globular protein, named FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT), which is produced in the mature leaf and transported to shoot meristem to induce flowering. This process satisfies the major prerequisites of florigen as a systemic floral signal (Corbesier et al, 2007; Tamaki et al, 2007)

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