Common Sense for the Biochemist

About a month ago, scientists reported in Science magazine that the FT transcript may be "Florigen". This report has been followed up by some very elegant experiments reported in the September 9, 2005 issue of Science. In a nutshell, researchers linked the FT gene to a heat shock inducible promoter. They were then able to heat shock a leaf of an arabidopsis plant and show that this caused flowering, presumably because the FT transcript had been made in the leaf and transported to the shoot apex. The authors go on to surmise that the FT gene can autoregulate itself and the presence of its transcript causes expression of the FT gene in the shoot apex. Note: Once again, the link contained on this page goes to an abstract which is only viewable by subscribers to Science magazine, I'll work on getting some better links. Added 10/03/05 - Here is the pubmed abstract for this article which is accesible to the public.