Maternal control of seed germination vigour

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The decision to germinate and the vigour of germination are vital traits for population fitness and crop performance. Both are highly contingent on environmental temperature: this is sensed not just by seeds themselves, but as we have been able to establish, also by the mother plant. Our work has shown that the fruit is a dynamic environmental sensing organ, integrating environmental signals detected over time scales of weeks and months for the purpose of passing timing information to progeny seeds. This signalling takes place in part using genes that also control time to flowering: however the architecture of this pathway in fruits and the target processes are profoundly different to those previously described. To take an unbiased approach to understanding this pathway we have used a classical forward screen for Arabidopsis loci that show low dormancy and high vigour under low temperature conditions that induce strongly dormant states in wild type seeds. Identifying and characterising genes mutated in three of these lines will generate an understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying the environmental control of seed vigour, and we will clone 3 of 11 mendelian loci isolated (years 3-4). Translated into crops, this work also creates the potential to improve seed vigour resilience to climate change, adding robustness to seed supply chains. We will directly exploit our knowledge for Brassica improvement by understanding flowering pathway activity in Brassica fruits and screening populations directly for traits known from Arabidopsis to underlie high and resilient seed and seedling vigour (years 4-5).

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