Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 17, Issue 10, Pages 1299-1309Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12338
Keywords
AP1; floral initiation; floral transition; flowering; FT; gene expression; gene network; intermittent reproduction; LFY; life cycle; resource budget model
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Funding
- IPhD project of SystemsX.ch
- University Research Priority Program in Global Change and Biodiversity of the University of Zurich
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- JSPS KAKENHI [21248017, 22119011]
- PRESTO
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [25119702, 21248017, 22119011, 14J11547] Funding Source: KAKEN
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The role of resource availability in determining the incidence of masting has been widely studied, but how floral transition and initiation are regulated by the resource level is unclear. We tested the hypothesis that floral transition is stimulated by high resource availabiltiy in Fagus crenata based on a new technique, the expression analyses of flowering genes. We isolated F. crenata orthologues of FLOWERING LOCUS T, LEAFY and APETALA1, and confirmed their functions using transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana. We monitored the gene expression levels for 5 years and detected a cycle of on and off years, which was correlated with fluctuations of the shoot-nitrogen concentration. Nitrogen fertilisation resulted in the significantly higher expression of flowering genes than the control, where all of the fertilised trees flowered, whereas the control did not. Our findings identified nitrogen as a key regulator of mast flowering, thereby providing new empirical evidence to support the resource budget model.
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