Genetic Basis of Flowering Time Variations in Tibetan Arabidopsis thaliana
Flowering time is a critical point in the life cycle of angiosperm plants.Arabidopsis thaliana of the Brassicaceae is widely distributed around the world,and the natural populations of this species have been found at altitude 4 000 m in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.The cold/short summer plateau climate has shaped their flowering time to be moderately early compared with those living in low altitude areas.In this study,we constructed an F2 mapping population and utilized whole-genome sequencing-based QTL-seq analysis to locate the major effect QTLs in Lhasa population of A.thaliana,and identified a haplotype-specific deletion of 2 307 bp within the first intron of FLC,which is unique to Tibetan A.thaliana.Lhasa population flc-/-mutant was constructed by CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique.The mutant exhibited signifi-cantly earlier flowering time than Lhasa.The above findings suggested that the deletion in the first intron of FLC in Tibetan A.thaliana was most likely the major cause for the early flowering phenotype,although it did not cause complete function loss of the FLC.This variation may have facilitated the adaptation of Tibetan A.thaliana to the unique climatic environ-ment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Tibetan Arabidopsis thalianaflowering timeFlowering Locus Cadaptive evolution
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