Abstract
Key message
We identified and characterized a dominant FT allele for flowering without vernalization in Brassica rapa, while demonstrating its potential for deployment in breeding to accelerate flowering in various Brassicaceae crops.
Abstract
Controlling the timing of flowering is key to improving yield and quality of several agricultural crops including the Brassicas. Many Brassicaceae crops possess a conserved flowering mechanism in which FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) represses the transcription of flowering activators such as FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) during vernalization. Here, we employed genetic analysis based on next-generation sequencing to identify a dominant FT allele, BraA.FT.2-C, for flowering in the absence of vernalization in the Brassica rapa cultivar ‘CHOY SUM EX CHINA 3’. BraA.FT.2-C harbors two large insertions upstream of its coding region and is expressed without vernalization, despite FLC expression. We show that BraA.FT.2-C offers an opportunity to introduce flowering without vernalization requirement into winter-type brassica crops, including B. napus, which have many functional FLC paralogs. Furthermore, we demonstrated the feasibility of using B. rapa harboring BraA.FT.2-C as rootstock for grafting to induce flowering in radish (Raphanus sativus), which requires vernalization for flowering. We believe that the ability of BraA.FT.2-C to overcome repression by FLC can have significant applications in brassica crops breeding to increase yields by accelerating or delaying flowering.
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Data availability
The accession numbers for the sequence data are listed in Supplemental Tables 2 and 3. All data can be accessed from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database.
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Acknowledgements
All computations were performed on the NIG supercomputer at Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS) of the National Institute of Genetics (Mishima, Shizuoka, Japan). Seeds of the Brassica rapa landraces/cultivars used in this study, except ‘YS’, were obtained from the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) Genebank. We specially thank Ryo Fujimoto (Kobe University) for kindly providing seeds of ‘YS’.
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MN performed genetic and expression analyses, MT conceived and supervised the entire study, MH performed grafting, TS performed Sat-BSA analysis, SS performed next generation sequencing, NM developed the segregating progenies used for genetic analysis, NI developed the segregating progenies and performed genetic analysis, TI performed expression analysis, MS conceived and supervised the entire study, and HT designed the research and wrote the paper. All authors contributed to the manuscript.
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Nishikawa, M., Tamiru-Oli, M., Hara, M. et al. Non-vernalization requirement for flowering in Brassica rapa conferred by a dominant allele of FLOWERING LOCUS T. Theor Appl Genet 136, 132 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-023-04378-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-023-04378-y