Published in Nature Plants: Monash University researchers have discovered a new mechanism that enables plants to regulate their flowering in response to raised temperatures.
The study found that in the flowering plant Arabidopsis the levels of a protein that prevents flowering is controlled by two key basic cellular processes that work together.
It has been known that increasing global temperatures have an impact on the flowering of plants. But the Monash researchers took a step towards unravelling the mechanisms behind this phenomenon.
And they believe that their finding could eventually lead to technology through which we will be able to control when plants flower under different temperatures.
The flowering event is controlled by 'floral repressors', which are proteins that prevent the onset of flowering.
The researchers show that in Arabidopsis warmer temperatures affect the production of a certain 'thermosensitive' floral repressor.
In many eukaryotic genes the information for the intermediate gene products, the messenger RNAs, is contained in sequence modules - so called exons. These are cut out from an intial gene product and put together to form the mRNA in a process called 'splicing'.
The researchers found that in the case of the floral repressor, the sites for the cuts in 'alternative splicing' events changes. The result are disfunctional mRNA products that are rapidly degraded.
The discovery was made by a team led by Associate Professor Sureshkumar Balasubramanian, who applied a combination of genetic, molecular and computational biology experiments.
One of the questions that results from this is whether this form of response to environmental changes is more widespread.