The Cloning and Functional Characterization of Peach CONSTANS and FLOWERING LOCUS T Homologous Genes PpCO and PpFT.

Tianhong Li,Xiayan Liu,Huike Liang,Yafei Qi,Meng-xiang Sun,Lijun An,Xiang Zhang,Rui Wang,Fei Yu,Thi Hung Nguyen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124108

Tianhong Li, Xiayan Liu + Show 8 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124108

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Abstract

Flowering is an essential stage of plant growth and development. The successful transition to flowering not only ensures the completion of plant life cycles, it also serves as the basis for the production of economically important seeds and fruits. CONSTANS (CO) and FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) are two genes playing critical roles in flowering time control in Arabidopsis. Through homology-based cloning and rapid-amplifications of cDNA ends (RACE), we obtained full-lengths cDNA sequences of Prunus persica CO (PpCO) and Prunus persica FT (PpFT) from peach (Prunus persica (L.) Batsch) and investigated their functions in flowering time regulation. PpCO and PpFT showed high homologies to Arabidopsis CO and FT at DNA, mRNA and protein levels. We showed that PpCO and PpFT were nucleus-localized and both showed transcriptional activation activities in yeast cells, consistent with their potential roles as transcription activators. Moreover, we established that the over-expression of PpCO could restore the late flowering phenotype of the Arabidopsis co-2 mutant, and the late flowering defect of the Arabidopsis ft-1 mutant can be rescued by the over-expression of PpFT, suggesting functional conservations of CO and FT genes in peach and Arabidopsis. Our results suggest that PpCO and PpFT are homologous genes of CO and FT in peach and they may function in regulating plant flowering time.

Highlights

The developmental transition from vegetative to reproductive growth is one of the most fundamental events during the life cycles of flowering plants
To identify potential expressed peach sequences related to CO and FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) in the public domain, we used CO and FT homologous sequences from a woody species apple (Malus domestica), MdCO (NCBI accession number AF052584) and MdFT (NCBI accession number AB161112), as the query sequences and searched the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) expressed sequence tag (EST) database
To isolate full-length cDNAs of Prunus persica CO (PpCO) and Prunus persica FT (PpFT), we carried out rapid-amplifications of cDNA ends (RACE) experiments based on the partial PpCO and PpFT sequences

Summary

Introduction

The developmental transition from vegetative to reproductive growth is one of the most fundamental events during the life cycles of flowering plants. Given the central role of flowering, it came as no surprise that a large number of genes act in a coordinated manner to ensure the successful induction of the flowering process in the model system Arabidopsis thaliana [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Among the flowering regulatory genes, CONSTANS (CO) plays a key role in the photoperioddependent induction of flowering in Arabidopsis and loss-of-function mutations of CO cause a PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0124108. Among the flowering regulatory genes, CONSTANS (CO) plays a key role in the photoperioddependent induction of flowering in Arabidopsis and loss-of-function mutations of CO cause a PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0124108 April 23, 2015

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