CONSTANS delays Arabidopsis flowering under short days

Abstract

Long days (LD) promote flowering of Arabidopsis thaliana compared with short days (SD) by activating the photoperiodic pathway. Here we show that growth under very-SD (3 h) or darkness (on sucrose) also accelerates flowering on a biological scale, indicating that SD actively repress flowering compared with very-SD. CONSTANS (CO) repressed flowering under SD, and the early flowering of co under SD required FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT). FT was expressed at a basal level in the leaves under SD, but these levels were not enhanced in co. This indicates that the action of CO in A. thaliana is not the mirror image of the action of its homologue in rice. In the apex, CO enhanced the expression of TERMINAL FLOWER 1 (TFL1) around the time when FT expression is important to promote flowering. Under SD, the tfl1 mutation was epistatic to co and in turn ft was epistatic to tfl1. These observations are consistent with the long-standing but not demonstrated model where CO can inhibit FT induction of flowering by affecting TFL1 expression.