14 DAY TRIAL // Would you like to enjoy tulips in October?
Or eating cherries in September?
For this to be done, scientists had to know what triggers flowering on plants.
A new research discovered it: a protein that works like a long-distance messenger from leaf to shoot-tip signaling the moment when the plant must flower.
The investigation, led in Arabidopsis plants, revealed how the mechanism is triggered as a response to day length changes. Previous researches guessed the existence of this messenger and showed that the plants' leaves detected seasonal changes in day length, sending a long-distance signal through the plant's vascular system to the shoot apex, but the culpable chemical had remained elusive.
The mixed team from Imperial College London and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne detected a protein baptized as Flowering Locus T Protein (FT protein), synthesized in leaves.
When FT protein reaches the shoot apex, it turns on the genes implied in flowering.
The research team was able to track the progress of the protein through the plant by tagging it with a green fluorescent protein originally isolated from jellyfish, allowing it to be detected in living tissues using highly sensitive microscope systems.
The team grafted two plants together, and one of them presented the gene for a fluorescent FT protein. This permitted the researchers to track down the route of the FT protein from synthesis location in the leaves of one plant into the other plant.
The FT gene is turned on by another gene, baptized CONSTANS, sensitive to changes in day length.
"This could be a really important breakthrough in plant science. Since the 1930s when it first became clear that something was communicating the perception of changes in day length in leaves to the shoot apex, and causing flowering, scientists have been trying to work out exactly how this mechanism works." said author Dr Colin Turnbull from Imperial College London's Division of Biology.
"Over the past couple of years several labs made exciting discoveries all pointing to the FT gene being central to controlling flowering time. Now that we have been able to track FT protein moving from its source in leaves to its destination in the shoot tip, we have a plausible explanation for how plants respond to day length. Parallel work in Japan shows very similar mechanisms operating in rice, so there is immediate potential to translate research into practical benefits for food crops. The ability to control flowering is of enormous commercial significance across food and non-food species, for example extending production seasons or designing plants better adapted to changing climate."