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Project

Towards precision breeding of flowering time in wheat using FLOWERING LOCUS C with background from the model Brachypodium

FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) and its paralogs in Arabidopsis are key regulators of cold dependent and temperature regulated flowering. Under the current threat of changing climates for cereal yield, they would be obvious candidates for crop breeding. However, these genes were until recently considered to be absent from cereal genomes and flowering time thought to be regulated completely differently. In contrast to previous beliefs, we demonstrated their presence (Ruelens et al. 2013) and found initial support for their functional similarity in the model grass Brachypodium (Sharma et al. 2016), which complements previous data in barley. This now opens the possibility of using FLC-like genes as a novel strategy in precision breeding of cereals.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  30 Sep 2021
Keywords:phenology, cereals, FLOWERING LOCUS C, climate change, adaptation
Disciplines:Plant biology, Agricultural plant production, Horticultural production