siRNAs targeting an intronic transposon in the regulation of natural flowering behavior in Arabidopsis

  1. Jun Liu1,3,
  2. Yuehui He2,
  3. Richard Amasino2, and
  4. Xuemei Chen1,4
  1. 1Waksman Institute, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA; 2Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA

Abstract

Allelic variation in FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), a central repressor of flowering, contributes to natural differences in flowering behavior among Arabidopsis accessions. The weak nature of the FLC allele in the Ler accession is due to low levels of FLC RNA resulting, through an unknown mechanism, from a transposable element inserted in an intron of FLC. Here we show that the transposable element renders FLC-Ler subject to repressive chromatin modifications mediated by short interfering RNAs generated from homologous transposable elements in the genome. Our studies have general implications for the role of transposable elements in eukaryotic gene expression and evolution.

Keywords

Footnotes

  • Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.

  • Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1217304.

  • ↵3 Present address: School of Life Science, Shanghai University, Shangda Road 99, Shanghai 200436, P.R. China.

  • ↵4 Corresponding author. E-MAIL xuemei{at}waksman.rutgers.edu; FAX (732) 445-5735.

    • Accepted September 27, 2004.
    • Received May 3, 2004.
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  1. Published in Advance November 15, 2004, doi: 10.1101/gad.1217304 Genes & Dev. 18: 2873-2878 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

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