Identification and molecular characterisation of genes involved in the perennial life cycle

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During the process of domestication directional selection favored plants with higher yield and shorter life cycle. Thus nowadays, most cultivated crops are annuals although their wild type ancestors are perennials. Cultivation of annual crops has negative impact on the environment and is limited to regions with optimal growth conditions. Thus new breeding efforts are aiming on the development of perennial crops. This project uses Arabis alpina as a model to study the molecular mechanisms that regulate flowering and perennial traits. Previously, a forward genetics approach in A. alpina resulted in the identification of genes that regulate flowering and contribute to the perennial growth habit. In the first phase I proposed to screen a mutagenised population of the perpetual flowering 1 (pep1) mutant and look for second-site mutants that affect flowering time and have pleiotropic effects on vegetative development. This study demonstrated that the A. alpina orthologue of APETALA2 (AaAP2) in A. alpina regulates flowering though a vernalisation -dependent and -independent pathway. The role of AP2 in vernalisation has not been previously reported in Arabidopsis thaliana. In the second phase I suggest to extend the study on AaAP2 and identify its targets using transcriptome profiling and Chromatin Immunoprecipitation. In the first phase I also identified three mutants that accelerate flowering compared to pep1 and have pleiotropic effects on inflorescence development. In the second phase I would like to isolate and characterise the genes responsible for these mutant phenotypes. The timing of inflorescence development in many temperate perennials differs compared to annuals and therefore identification of these genes might give insights on this process. A. alpina is a member of the Brassicaceae family. Therefore, understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating flowering and perennial traits can be directly applied to the development of perennial Brassica crops and generate knowledge about the principles regulating perennialism in diverged perennials.