Quinet, Muriel
[UCL]
Tomato is an important commercial crop and hence there is a great interest in understanding the genetic basis of its flowering. Several genes are known that control inflorescence architecture in tomato but the emerging view is still fragmented because most functional analyses concern single mutations affecting either inflorescence or flower fate. Double mutants were constructed in order to clarify their interactions. Crosses combined mutations in meristematic genes: compound inflorescence (s) that increases branching of the inflorescence, falsiflora (fa) that increases branching and replaces flowers by leafy shoots, jointless (j) that causes inflorescence to revert to leaf production after initiation of few flowers and uniflora (uf) that produces solitary flowers. The single flower truss (sft) mutant was also used to assess the effect of systemic florigenic signal; SFT is indeed the tomato orthologue of the Arabidopsis FT gene and acts as a potent flowering promoter. The phenotype of the double mutants suggested a tight spatial regulatory model of inflorescence initiation. It was shown before that the branching of the tomato inflorescence depends on the gradual transition from inflorescence meristem (IM) to flower meristem (FM): the extension of this time window allows IM to branch as seen in s and fa mutants. This, however, was not observed when uf, j or sft mutations were added. In the j:sft double mutant, no IM is formed and all inflorescences are reduced to solitary flowers. Our results suggest that the making of an inflorescence in tomato requires the interaction of J and a target of SFT in the meristem, possibly for repressing FM fate in the IM.


Bibliographic reference |
Quinet, Muriel. Genetic interactions shaping the inflorescence of tomato.Target Meeting’s 1st World Genetics & Genomics Online Conference (online Conference, du 17/5/2012 au 19/5/2012). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078/127069 |