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JXB Advance Access published online on January 27, 2009
Journal of Experimental Botany, doi:10.1093/jxb/ern334
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© 2009 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper is available online free of all access charges (see http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/open_access.html for further details)

RESEARCH PAPER

Co-ordinated regulation of flowering time, plant architecture and growth by FASCICULATE: the pepper orthologue of SELF PRUNING

Tomer Elitzur1, Hadas Nahum2, Yelena Borovsky1, Irena Pekker2, Yuval Eshed2 and Ilan Paran1,*

1Institute of Plant Sciences, Agricultural Research Organization, The Volcani Center, PO Box 6, Bet Dagan 50250, Israel
2Department of Plant Science, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

* To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail: iparan{at}volcani.agri.gov.il

Wild peppers (Capsicum spp.) are either annual or perennial in their native habitat and their shoot architecture is dictated by their sympodial growth habit. To study shoot architecture in pepper, sympodial development is described in wild type and in the classical recessive fasciculate (fa) mutation. The basic sympodial unit in wild-type pepper comprises two leaves and a single terminal flower. fasciculate plants are characterized by the formation of floral clusters separated by short internodes and miniature leaves and by early flowering. Developmental analysis of these clusters revealed shorter sympodial units and, often, precocious termination prior to sympodial leaf formation. fa was mapped to pepper chromosome 6, in a region corresponding to the tomato SELF-PRUNING (SP) locus, the homologue of TFL1 of Arabidopsis. Sequence comparison between wild-type and fa plants revealed a duplication of the second exon in the mutants' orthologue of SP, leading to the formation of a premature stop codon. Ectopic expression of FASCICULATE complemented the Arabidopsis tfl1 mutant plants and as expected, stimulated late flowering. In agreement with the major effect of FASCICULATE imposed on sympodial development, the gene transcripts were localized to the centre of sympodial shoots but could not be detected in the primary shoot. The wide range of pleiotropic effects on plant architecture mediated by a single ‘flowering’ gene, suggests that it is used to co-ordinate many developmental events, and thus may underlie some of the widespread variation in the Solanaceae shoot architecture.

Key words: FASCICULATE, flowering time, pepper, plant architecture, SELF PRUNING, sympodial development

Received 21 September 2008; Revised 24 November 2008 Accepted 27 November 2008


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