• Response to low temperature during early growth in cultivated chickpea (Cicer arietinum) and its wild progenitor C. reticulatum was investigated to clarify the evolutionary processes under domestication in this crop. • Parental lines and their F2 and F3 progeny were exposed to cold treatment (4°C) for 30°d after seed imbibition and compared with controls. • Cold treatment caused a 19-d advanc...

Vernalization establishes a memory of winter that must be maintained for weeks or months in order to promote flowering the following spring. The stability of the vernalized state varies among plant species and depends on the duration of cold exposure. In Arabidopsis thaliana, winter leads to epigenetic silencing of the floral repressor gene FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) and the duration of cold is me...

The MADS box gene, AGAMOUS-LIKE 20 (AGL20), integrates environmental and endogenous flowering signals in Arabidopsis thaliana. In order to determine if its role is conserved in other plants, we isolated AGL20 orthologs from Brassica campestris, Cardamine flexuosa and Draba nemorosa. The putative amino acid sequences of the orthologs were 94 to 97% identical. We analyzed the flowering phenotype ...

Vernalization is the process by which sensing a prolonged exposure to winter cold leads to competence to flower in the spring. In winter annual Arabidopsis thaliana accessions, flowering is suppressed in the fall by expression of the potent floral repressor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC)1. Vernalization promotes flowering via epigenetic repression of FLC2. Repression is accompanied by a series of hist...

Vernalization is an environmentally-induced epigenetic switch in which winter cold triggers epigenetic silencing of floral repressors and thus provides competence to flower in spring. In Arabidopsis, winter cold triggers enrichment of tri-methylated histone H3 Lys(27) at chromatin of the floral repressor, FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), and results in epigenetically stable repression of FLC. This epig...

INTRODUCTION During eukaryotic chromosome replication, both genetic and epigenetic information are accurately duplicated, which maintains identical cellular memory through mitoses (Margueron and Reinberg, 2010). DNA replication accompanies chromatin assembly, and the cooperation between these two processes has long been proposed to be important for the mitotic maintenance of epigenetic informat...

Intermediate wheatgrass [Thinopyrum intermedium (Host) Barkworth and D.R. Dewey], bred for high grain yield, has become the first perennial in North America is commercialized under tradename Kernza. The expansion of this crop from U.S. Midwest to areas with milder winters would require an understanding its vernalization requirements flowering availability genetic diversity trait. goal research ...