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"Plants, Flowering of"
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The water lily genome and the early evolution of flowering plants
Water lilies belong to the angiosperm order Nymphaeales. Amborellales, Nymphaeales and Austrobaileyales together form the so-called ANA-grade of angiosperms, which are extant representatives of lineages that diverged the earliest from the lineage leading to the extant mesangiosperms
1
–
3
. Here we report the 409-megabase genome sequence of the blue-petal water lily (
Nymphaea colorata
). Our phylogenomic analyses support Amborellales and Nymphaeales as successive sister lineages to all other extant angiosperms. The
N. colorata
genome and 19 other water lily transcriptomes reveal a Nymphaealean whole-genome duplication event, which is shared by Nymphaeaceae and possibly Cabombaceae. Among the genes retained from this whole-genome duplication are homologues of genes that regulate flowering transition and flower development. The broad expression of homologues of floral ABCE genes in
N. colorata
might support a similarly broadly active ancestral ABCE model of floral organ determination in early angiosperms. Water lilies have evolved attractive floral scents and colours, which are features shared with mesangiosperms, and we identified their putative biosynthetic genes in
N. colorata
. The chemical compounds and biosynthetic genes behind floral scents suggest that they have evolved in parallel to those in mesangiosperms. Because of its unique phylogenetic position, the
N. colorata
genome sheds light on the early evolution of angiosperms.
The genome of the tropical blue-petal water lily
Nymphaea colorata
and the transcriptomes from 19 other Nymphaeales species provide insights into the early evolution of angiosperms.
Journal Article
Untargeted metabolomics and functional analyses reveal that the secondary metabolite quinic acid associates with Angelica sinensis flowering
Flowering is a critical step in the plant life cycle.
Angelica sinensis
(Oliv.) Diels is a medicinal crop whose root is a well-known herbal medicine used in Asia. Early flowering causes changes in secondary metabolic flow and results in the loss of medicinal quality. Based on untargeted metabolomics studies, quinic acid was identified as a metabolite present in significantly higher concentrations during the early-flowering stage in
A. sinensis
leaves. This metabolite was subsequently investigated as a potential marker for early bolting in
A. sinensis
under field conditions. Moreover, quinic acid was found to accelerate flowering in the model plant
Arabidopsis thaliana
. Importantly, the flowering time was delayed in the quinate dehydrogenase
At
mutant, and this delay was reversed by quinic acid. Quinic acid upregulated the expression of the GA20OX and GID1 receptors and downregulated the expression of the inhibitor DELLA, thereby affecting the levels of FT and LFY and accelerating plant flowering. Quinic acid also significantly changed the expression of genes such as LOX, JAZ1, MYC2 and MYC3 in the jasmonic acid pathway. The trends of GID1, DELLA (GAI) and LOX2 protein expression were essentially consistent with those at the transcription level. These results suggest that quinic acid may promote plant flowering primarily by regulating the expression of genes and proteins in the gibberellin and jasmonic acid pathways.
Journal Article
DeepFlower: a deep learning-based approach to characterize flowering patterns of cotton plants in the field
Background
Flowering is one of the most important processes for flowering plants such as cotton, reflecting the transition from vegetative to reproductive growth and is of central importance to crop yield and adaptability. Conventionally, categorical scoring systems have been widely used to study flowering patterns, which are laborious and subjective to apply. The goal of this study was to develop a deep learning-based approach to characterize flowering patterns for cotton plants that flower progressively over several weeks, with flowers distributed across much of the plant.
Results
A ground mobile system (GPhenoVision) was modified with a multi-view color imaging module, to acquire images of a plant from four viewing angles at a time. A total of 116 plants from 23 genotypes were imaged during an approximately 2-month period with an average scanning interval of 2–3 days, yielding a dataset containing 8666 images. A subset (475) of the images were randomly selected and manually annotated to form datasets for training and selecting the best object detection model. With the best model, a deep learning-based approach (DeepFlower) was developed to detect and count individual emerging blooms for a plant on a given date. The DeepFlower was used to process all images to obtain bloom counts for individual plants over the flowering period, using the resulting counts to derive flowering curves (and thus flowering characteristics). Regression analyses showed that the DeepFlower method could accurately (R
2
= 0.88 and RMSE = 0.79) detect and count emerging blooms on cotton plants, and statistical analyses showed that imaging-derived flowering characteristics had similar effectiveness as manual assessment for identifying differences among genetic categories or genotypes.
Conclusions
The developed approach could thus be an effective and efficient tool to characterize flowering patterns for flowering plants (such as cotton) with complex canopy architecture.
Journal Article
FloralArea: AI-powered algorithm for automated calculation of floral area from flower images to support plant and pollinator research
Floral area is a major predictor of the attractiveness of a flowering plant for pollinators, yet the measurement of floral area is time-consuming and inconsistent across studies. Here, we developed an AI-powered algorithm, FloralArea, to automate floral area measurement from an image. The FloralArea algorithm has two main components: an object segmentation module and an area estimation module. The object segmentation module extracts the pixels of flowers and the reference object in an image. The area estimation module predicts floral area based on the ratio between flower and reference object pixels. We fine-tuned two YOLOv8 segmentation models for flower and reference object segmentation. The flower segmentation model achieved moderate precision, recall, mAP0.5, and mAP0.5-0.95 of 0.794, 0.68, 0.741, and 0.455 on the test dataset, while the reference object model achieved an impressive performance of 0.907, 0.940, 0.933, and 0.832. We evaluated FloralArea using 75 images of flowering plants. We used ImageJ to calculate the actual floral area for all the images and compared them with the predicted floral area from FloralArea. The predicted floral area correlated well with the measured floral area with a coefficient of determination (R 2 ) of 0.93 and a root mean square error of 20.58 cm 2 . The FloralArea algorithm reduced the time it takes to calculate floral area from an image by 99.24% compared with traditional methods with image processing tools like ImageJ. By streamlining floral area estimation, the FloralArea algorithm provides a scalable, efficient, consistent, and accessible tool for researchers, particularly to aid in assessing plant attractiveness to different pollinator groups.
Journal Article
Flowering seasonality drives taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of hummingbirds along an altitudinal gradient in northwestern Mexico
Floral resources in the mountains of northwestern Mexico are strongly seasonal. This influences latitudinal, local, and altitudinal migration patterns in hummingbird species, resulting in temporal changes in hummingbird community structure over the flowering period. In this study, we evaluated how the seasonality of floral resources and latitudinal migration of hummingbirds influenced taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity along an altitudinal gradient. We examined the functional and morphological space occupied by resident and migrant hummingbird species, as well as the species’ functional niches and the phylogenetic structure of species assemblages in three sites of northwestern Mexico. We recorded hummingbird and flower abundance using two transects with 15 point counts on each altitudinal gradient in the Sierra Madre Occidental. The transects spanned from tropical deciduous forest to pine-oak forest and the ecotone between them. We recorded 20 hummingbird species and 70 flowering plant species belonging to 30 families. We found that taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity were linked to the flower abundance. Seasonal latitudinal hummingbird migration was less important for functional diversity (since migratory species performed redundant functional roles) than taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity. Seasonal flowering along the altitudinal gradient drives various types of hummingbird movements (local, altitudinal, and latitudinal), which increases the number of hummingbird species fulfilling each functional role. Apparent phylogenetic clustering in the ecotone may be due to a convergence between temperate and tropical forest flora and the midpoint of hummingbirds’ altitudinal migrations. Our study highlights the temporal dynamism and strong influence of floral seasonality on the structure of hummingbird communities in the mountains of northwestern Mexico.
Journal Article
FTIP1 Is an Essential Regulator Required for Florigen Transport
The capacity to respond to day length, photoperiodism, is crucial for flowering plants to adapt to seasonal change. The photoperiodic control of flowering in plants is mediated by a long-distance mobile floral stimulus called florigen that moves from leaves to the shoot apex. Although the proteins encoded by FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) in Arabidopsis and its orthologs in other plants are identified as the long-sought florigen, whether their transport is a simple diffusion process or under regulation remains elusive. Here we show that an endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane protein, FT-INTERACTING PROTEIN 1 (FTIP1), is an essential regulator required for FT protein transport in Arabidopsis. Loss of function of FTIP1 exhibits late flowering under long days, which is partly due to the compromised FT movement to the shoot apex. FTIP1 and FT share similar mRNA expression patterns and subcellular localization, and they interact specifically in phloem companion cells. FTIP1 is required for FT export from companion cells to sieve elements, thus affecting FT transport through the phloem to the SAM. Our results provide a mechanistic understanding of florigen transport, demonstrating that FT moves in a regulated manner and that FTIP1 mediates FT transport to induce flowering.
Journal Article
Genome-wide identification, expression, and sequence analysis of CONSTANS-like gene family in cannabis reveals a potential role in plant flowering time regulation
Background
Cannabis, an important industrial crop, has a high sensitivity to photoperiods. The flowering time of cannabis is one of its important agronomic traits, and has a significant effect on its yield and quality. The
CONSTANS-like
(
COL
) gene plays a key role in the regulation of flowering in this plant. However, the specific roles of the
COL
gene family in cannabis are still unknown.
Results
In this study, 13
CsCOL
genes were identified in the cannabis genome. Phylogenetic analysis implied that the CsCOL proteins were divided into three subgroups, and each subgroup included conserved intron/exon structures and motifs. Chromosome distribution analysis showed that 13
CsCOL
genes were unevenly distributed on 7 chromosomes, with chromosome 10 having the most
CsCOL
members. Collinearity analysis showed that two syntenic gene pairs of
CsCOL4
and
CsCOL11
were found in both rice and
Gossypium raimondii
. Of the 13
CsCOL
genes,
CsCOL6
and
CsCOL12
were a pair of tandem duplicated genes, whereas
CsCOL8
and
CsCOL11
may have resulted from segmental duplication. Furthermore, tissue-specific expression showed that 10
CsCOL
genes were preferentially expressed in the leaves, 1
CsCOL
in the stem, and 2
CsCOL
in the female flower. Most
CsCOL
exhibited a diurnal oscillation pattern under different light treatment. Additionally, sequence analysis showed that
CsCOL3
and
CsCOL7
exhibited amino acid differences among the early-flowering and late flowering cultivars.
Conclusion
This study provided insight into the potential functions of
CsCOL
genes, and highlighted their roles in the regulation of flowering time in cannabis. Our results laid a foundation for the further elucidation of the functions of
COL
genes in cannabis.
Journal Article
Managing flowering time in Miscanthus and sugarcane to facilitate intra- and intergeneric crosses
Miscanthus is a close relative of Saccharum and a potentially valuable genetic resource for improving sugarcane. Differences in flowering time within and between Miscanthus and Saccharum hinders intra- and interspecific hybridizations. A series of greenhouse experiments were conducted over three years to determine how to synchronize flowering time of Saccharum and Miscanthus genotypes. We found that day length was an important factor influencing when Miscanthus and Saccharum flowered. Sugarcane could be induced to flower in a central Illinois greenhouse using supplemental lighting to reduce the rate at which days shortened during the autumn and winter to 1 min d -1 , which allowed us to synchronize the flowering of some sugarcane genotypes with Miscanthus genotypes primarily from low latitudes. In a complementary growth chamber experiment, we evaluated 33 Miscanthus genotypes, including 28 M . sinensis , 2 M . floridulus , and 3 M . ×giganteus collected from 20.9° S to 44.9° N for response to three day lengths (10 h, 12.5 h, and 15 h). High latitude-adapted M . sinensis flowered mainly under 15 h days, but unexpectedly, short days resulted in short, stocky plants that did not flower; in some cases, flag leaves developed under short days but heading did not occur. In contrast, for M . sinensis and M . floridulus from low latitudes, shorter day lengths typically resulted in earlier flowering, and for some low latitude genotypes, 15 h days resulted in no flowering. However, the highest ratio of reproductive shoots to total number of culms was typically observed for 12.5 h or 15 h days. Latitude of origin was significantly associated with culm length, and the shorter the days, the stronger the relationship. Nearly all entries achieved maximal culm length under the 15 h treatment, but the nearer to the equator an accession originated, the less of a difference in culm length between the short-day treatments and the 15 h day treatment. Under short days, short culms for high-latitude accessions was achieved by different physiological mechanisms for M . sinensis genetic groups from the mainland in comparison to those from Japan; for mainland accessions, the mechanism was reduced internode length, whereas for Japanese accessions the phyllochron under short days was greater than under long days. Thus, for M . sinensis , short days typically hastened floral induction, consistent with the expectations for a facultative short-day plant. However, for high latitude accessions of M . sinensis , days less than 12.5 h also signaled that plants should prepare for winter by producing many short culms with limited elongation and development; moreover, this response was also epistatic to flowering. Thus, to flower M . sinensis that originates from high latitudes synchronously with sugarcane, the former needs day lengths >12.5 h (perhaps as high as 15 h), whereas that the latter needs day lengths <12.5 h.
Journal Article