Soybean AP1 homologs control flowering time and plant height

• 作者: Baohui Liu Chao Fang Fanjiang Kong Haiyang Li Haiyang Nan Hui Yang Lidong Dong Lin Yue Lingping Kong Liyu Chen Qingsong Zhao Qun Cheng Sijia Lu
• 来源期刊: 植物学报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（12）
• 所属期刊栏目: Molecular Physiology
• 页码范围: 1868-1879
• 页数: 12页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1111/jipb.12988

摘要

Flowering time and plant height are key agro-nomic traits that directly affect soybean (Glycine max) yield. APETALA1 (AP1) functions as a class A gene in the ABCE model for floral organ development, helping to specify carpel, stamen, petal, and sepal identities. There are four AP1 homologs in soybean, all of which are mainly expressed in the shoot apex. Here, we used clustered regularly inter-spaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) – CRISPR-associated protein 9 technology to generate a homozygous quadruple mutant, gmap1, with loss-of-function mutations in all four GmAP1 genes. Under short-day (SD) conditions, the gmap1 quadruple mutant exhibited delayed flowering, changes in flower morphology, and increased node number and internode length, resulting in plants that were taller than the wild type. Conversely, overexpression of GmAP1a resulted in early flowering and reduced plant height com-pared to the wild type under SD conditions. The gmap1 mutant and the overexpression lines also exhibited altered expression of several genes related to flowering and gib-berellic acid metabolism, thereby providing insight into the role of GmAP1 in the regulatory networks controlling flow-ering time and plant height in soybean. Increased node number is the trait with the most promise for enhancing soybean pod number and grain yield. Therefore, the mutant alleles of the four AP1 homologs described here will be invaluable for molecular breeding of improved soybean yield.