Fine tuning wheat development for the winter to spring transition.

The coordination of floral developmental stages with the environment is important for reproductive success and the optimization of crop yields. The timing of different developmental stages contributes to final yield potential with optimal adaptation enabling development to proceed without being impacted by seasonal weather events, including frosts or end of season drought. Here we characterise the role of FLOWERING LOCUS T 3 (FT3) in hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) during the early stages of floral development.

Seasons and shape: Inflorescences from autumn to summer.

Flowering plants organize their reproductive organs within specialized structures named inflorescences. Plasticity in the architecture of these inflorescences allows adaptation to the environment during flowering, ultimately determining reproductive output and yield. Inflorescence development relies on meristems, hubs of pluripotent cells that direct organogenesis.

FLOWERING LOCUS T-mediated thermal signalling regulates age-dependent inflorescence development in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Many plants show strong heteroblastic changes in the shape and size of organs as they transition from juvenile to reproductive age. Most attention has been focused on heteroblastic development in leaves, but we wanted to understand heteroblastic changes in reproductive organ size. We therefore studied the progression of reproductive development in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and found strong reductions in the size of flowers, fruit, seed, and internodes during development.

FLOWERING LOCUS T mediates photo-thermal timing of inflorescence meristem arrest in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Plants integrate environmental information into their developmental program throughout their lifetime. Light and temperature are particularly critical cues for plants to correctly time developmental transitions. Here, we investigated the role of photo-thermal cues in the regulation of the end-of-flowering developmental transition in the model plant Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana).

Bloom and bust: understanding the nature and regulation of the end of flowering.

The reproduction of flowering plants is an incredibly important process, both ecologically and economically. A huge body of work has examined the mechanisms by which flowering plants correctly time their entry into the reproductive phase (the 'floral transition'). However, the corresponding mechanisms by which plants exit the reproductive phase remain relatively neglected.

Auxin export from proximal fruits drives arrest in temporally competent inflorescences.

A well-defined set of regulatory pathways control entry into the reproductive phase in flowering plants, but little is known about the mechanistic control of the end-of-flowering despite this being a critical process for optimization of fruit and seed production. Complete fruit removal, or lack of fertile fruit-set, prevents timely inflorescence arrest in Arabidopsis, leading to a previous proposal that a cumulative fruit/seed-derived signal causes simultaneous 'global proliferative arrest'. Recent studies have suggested that inflorescence arrest involves gene expression changes in the inflorescence meristem that are, at least in part, controlled by the FRUITFULL-APETALA2 pathway; however, there is limited understanding of how this process is coordinated at the whole-plant level.