Plant Breeding: The ABCs of Flower Development in Arabidopsis and Rice

Abstract

Understanding the genetic basis of flower formation has been pioneered in higher eudicotyledonous flowering plants such as thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) and petunia (Petunia hybrida) (for a review, see Theißen and Saedler 1999). A deeper understanding of flower origin and diversification, however, requires studies in phylogenetic informative taxa outside the higher eudicots, including basal eudicots, monocots and basal angiosperms (Soltis et al. 2002). Such studies will comprise ‘phylogenomic’ approaches on gene families of interest (such as the MADS-box gene family), comparative EST sequencing and expression studies in a huge number of taxa (Soltis et al. 2002). These efforts, however, will allow only quite limited conclusions on the phylogeny of gene functions and thus should be complemented by comparative developmental genetics studies (Baum et al. 2002), implying that suitable model systems have to be established for different key non-eudicotyledonous flowering plant taxa. This will be a laborious effort, since very few plant species are amenable to the required technology (such as transformation).KeywordsFloral OrganFloral MeristemFemale Reproductive OrganFloral Meristem IdentityFloral Homeotic GeneThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.