The Cloning and Functional Characterization of Peach CONSTANS and FLOWERING LOCUS T Homologous Genes PpCO and PpFT

PLoS One. 2015 Apr 23;10(4):e0124108. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124108. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Flowering is an essential stage of plant growth and development. The successful transition to flowering not only ensures the completion of plant life cycles, it also serves as the basis for the production of economically important seeds and fruits. CONSTANS (CO) and FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) are two genes playing critical roles in flowering time control in Arabidopsis. Through homology-based cloning and rapid-amplifications of cDNA ends (RACE), we obtained full-lengths cDNA sequences of Prunus persica CO (PpCO) and Prunus persica FT (PpFT) from peach (Prunus persica (L.) Batsch) and investigated their functions in flowering time regulation. PpCO and PpFT showed high homologies to Arabidopsis CO and FT at DNA, mRNA and protein levels. We showed that PpCO and PpFT were nucleus-localized and both showed transcriptional activation activities in yeast cells, consistent with their potential roles as transcription activators. Moreover, we established that the over-expression of PpCO could restore the late flowering phenotype of the Arabidopsis co-2 mutant, and the late flowering defect of the Arabidopsis ft-1 mutant can be rescued by the over-expression of PpFT, suggesting functional conservations of CO and FT genes in peach and Arabidopsis. Our results suggest that PpCO and PpFT are homologous genes of CO and FT in peach and they may function in regulating plant flowering time.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Cloning, Molecular
  • Flowers
  • Genes, Plant*
  • Genetic Complementation Test
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Plant Proteins / chemistry
  • Plant Proteins / genetics
  • Prunus persica / genetics*
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / genetics
  • Sequence Homology, Amino Acid
  • Transcriptional Activation

Substances

  • Plant Proteins

Grants and funding

This work was supported by funds from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31071073, 31170219 to F.Y., 31100864 to X.L., 31300988 to Y.Q. and 31470290 to L.A.), and by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province, China (2011JQ3004 to X.L., 2012JQ3015 to Y.Q. and 2013JQ3014 to L.A.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.