In many plant species, flowering is controlled by day length through the transcriptional regulation of a key gene called
FLOWERING LOCUS T (
FT) in the model plant Thale cress (
Arabidopsis thaliana). The Turck group at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (Cologne, Germany) has used an epigenetic approach to systematically probe regions surrounding the
FT locus for a regulatory role in FT expression. As they now report in Nature Plants (doi 10.1038/s41477-019-0375-2),
FT’s response to long days requires the presence of both, a previously characterized distal enhancer located in the promoter and the support of its “shadow” enhancer located downstream of the gene.
[more]