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FLOWERING CONTROL

A path to a biennial life history

Nature Plants volume 4, pages 752–753 (2018)Cite this article

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Biennial plants require exposure to the cold of winter to overcome a block to flowering in the spring. The molecular role of FRIGIDA, a key component of the system that establishes the cold requirement in Arabidopsis, is to assemble a protein super-complex that promotes expression of a flowering repressor in the autumn.

An adaptation of certain plants to temperate climates is the evolution of a biennial or winter-annual life history. Plants with this life history typically become established in the autumn and flower rapidly in the spring, when conditions are optimal for seed production (for example, adequate moisture and less competition with larger plants for light and nutrients). A key feature of this life history is the evolution of systems that repress flowering in the autumn and enable it in the spring. The enabling of spring flowering occurs through a process referred to as vernalization, in which exposure to the prolonged cold of winter leads to alleviation of the repression of flowering1. The system that represses flowering in the autumn creates a vernalization requirement. In many species, including Arabidopsis, there is natural variation for a vernalization requirement. Several decades ago, Napp-Zinn found that allelic variation at a gene, which he named FRIGIDA (FRI), was responsible for the presence or absence of a vernalization requirement in many accessions of Arabidopsis2 (Fig. 1). Almost four decades later, additional natural variation studies revealed a second gene, FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), that, together with FRI, confers a vernalization requirement3,4. The molecular cloning of FLC (refs 5,6) revealed that it encodes a MADS-box protein that, as a potent flowering repressor, creates a vernalization requirement and that a dominant allele of FRI is necessary for FLC expression. The cloning of FRI revealed that it encoded a protein unique to plants and that recessive fri alleles, from accessions that did not require vernalization, were likely to be loss-of-function alleles7. Thus, the wild-type role of FRI is to promote FLC expression. The first indication of the biochemical role of FRI in FLC expression was the demonstration in a landmark paper by Choi et al.8 that FRI was part of a complex containing several other proteins that genetic analyses had revealed were FLC regulators, that FRI was a scaffolding protein for the complex, and that other complex proteins had a range of roles such as transcriptional activation or recognizing a promoter sequence of FLC. A paper by Li et al.9 in this issue of Nature Plants indicates that Choi et al. had revealed the tip of the iceberg so to speak, and there is an additional, fascinating level of higher-order complexity.

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Fig. 1: Arabidopsis plants with and without an active allele of FRIGIDA.

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  1. Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Richard Amasino

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  1. Richard Amasino
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Correspondence to Richard Amasino.

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Amasino, R. A path to a biennial life history. Nature Plants 4, 752–753 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0265-z

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