Oxford Journals

Flowering Newsletter 2009

Preface

One of the most thumbed books of the last couple of years is Beverley Glover’s Understanding flowers and flowering, so we are privileged to have Beverley’s favourite flowering image, and its associated story, in FNL2009. Effie Mutasa-Göttgens and Peter Hedden provide a masterly overview of the roles of GAs in flowering. Ulf Lagercrantz does a similarly thorough job with photoperiod responses, examining the extent of commonality between the model annual Arabidopsis and perennial plants, in which the trick is to keep flowering in balance with vegetative growth. Taking the discussion of environmental control of flowering time to the crop level, Peter Craufurd and Tim Wheeler discuss the interaction of photoperiod and temperature, with emphasis on the over-optimal temperatures likely to result from climate change. Jim Weller and colleagues treat us to an update on their laboratory’s work on the garden pea, offering the insight arising from the consistent focus of the Tasmania group on this plant over many years. Vivian Irish, in a paper on the evolution of petal identity, gives a timely consideration of how key control genes have been recruited to different developmental programmes in diverse lineages of angiosperms. The FNL2008 bibliography is our attempt to summarize the flowering literature of last year; we hope you will find it useful.

Nick Battey
May 2009