Dissecting Vernalization in Brassica

The UK has a strong base in flowering time research, especially in the control of vernalization. From the work of Caroline Dean at the John Innes Centre, and others, much is now known about the genetic pathways regulating vernalization in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The aim of this programme is to identify the genes controlling vernalization in Brassica and exploit this information to develop tools to speed up the breeding in Brassica vegetable crops.
We will exploit the continually expanding genomic resources in Brassica to map paralogues of key Arabidopsis genes involved in the control of flowering with a focus on known vernalization genes. We will use Brassica: Arabidopsis synteny to identify putative candidates underlying QTL mapped under different temperature x time treatments. Identification of candidate genes for selected QTL will be confirmed by functional analysis including co-segregation of alleles with maturity phenotypes in backcross progeny together with complementation tests in appropriate Arabidopsis mutants. We will demonstrate the generality of our findings by analysing allelic variation in a wide range of germplasm including the Defra funded Diversity Fixed Foundation Sets (DFFS) for B.oleracea and the wild C genome being produced at Warwick HRI.
Allelic variation will be related to performance under past and present weather patterns. We will use the UKCP scenarios, and in particular the Weather generator, to model future growing conditions. We will link past and current variety performance to inform future breeding strategies for continuity of production.