Co-option of a photoperiodic growth-phase transition system during land plant evolution

Abstract

Photoperiodic control of the phase transition from vegetative to reproductive growth is critical for land plants. The GIGANTEA (GI) and FLAVIN-BINDING KELCH REPEAT F-BOX1 (FKF1) protein complex controls this process in angiosperms. However, little is known about how plants evolved this regulatory system. Here, we report that orthologues of GI and FKF1 are present in a basal plant, the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, and describe the molecular interaction between their products. Knockout of either the GI or FKF1 orthologue completely abolishes the long-day-dependent growth-phase transition in M. polymorpha. Overexpression of either gene promotes growth-phase transition, even under short-day conditions. Introduction of the GI orthologue partially rescues the late-flowering phenotype of the Arabidopsis thaliana gi mutant. Our findings suggest that plants had already acquired the GI-FKF1 system to regulate growth-phase transition when they colonized land, and that this system was co-opted from gametophyte to sporophyte generation during evolution.

Diurnal expression of <i>CONSTANS-like</i> genes is independent of the function of cycling DOF factor (CDF)-like transcriptional repressors in <i>Physcomitrella patens</i>

“…This lysine residue is not conserved in PpDof3 or PpDof4 (Figure 1b), which is consistent with the lack of an apparent interaction between PpDof3 and PpDof4 and FKF1. The GI-FKF1 system to regulate growthphase transition was very recently found in the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha (Kubota et al 2014). As P. patens lacks homologues of FKF1 and GI (Holm et al 2010), identification and characterization of CDF-like Dof proteins and COLs in M. polymorpha might provide a new clue to understand the origin of the CO-mediated regulatory pathway.…”

Marchantia polymorpha L.: An Emerging Model Plant System to Study Contemporary Plant Biology – A Review

“…The result shows that the frequency of HR is approximately 2% of transformants that passed the positive/negative selection. This method is also proved to be useful in the gene targeting of other genetic loci such as MpGI, MpFKF (Kubota et al, 2014), MpPHOT (Komatsu et al, 2014) and MpTAA (Eklund et al, 2015). The knockout of essential gene may lead to lethality in haploid system and this show the inadequacy of HR mediated gene targeting in haploid M. polymorpha.Thus, to overcome this problem, conditional knockout strategy based on an inducible site-specific recombination system was developed in M. polymorpha by Nishihama et al (2015a).…”

“…Gene targeting mediated by HR is a powerful tool for functional analysis in reverse genetics. Homologous recombination based gene targeting has been used for targeted disruption of many genetic loci in M. polymorpha, such as, NOP1 (Ishizaki et al, 2013a),MpGI, MpFKF (Kubota et al, 2014), MpPHOT (Komatsu et al, 2014) and MpTAA (Eklund et al, 2015). However, HR-mediated gene targeting is suitable for the single mutation (Ishizaki et al, 2013a;Ishizaki et al, 2013b).…”

“…One such study showed that the long day conditions induce the formation of archegoniophores and antheridiophores in male and female individuals, respectively (Wann, 1925;Benson-Evans, 1961). Recently, the development of knockout of GI or FKF1 gene responsible for photoperiodic growth transition puts an end to the dependency of growth phase transition on photoperiod (Kubota et al, 2014). In addition, the FR is indispensable to induce the transition in M. polymorpha , signifying the involvement of a phytochrome in the regulatory process.…”

“…The further improvement of this protocol, called 'agartrap' method is widely used to obtain independent transgenic plants suitable for the molecular analysis (Tsuboyama and Kodama, 2014). Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of thallus has been also utilized for the secondary transformation of existing transgenic lines (Ishizaki et al, 2013a;Komatsu et al, 2014;Kubota et al, 2014).…”