Function Studies Of Delaying Flowering Of Silence PhNF-YC9 On Petunia

At present,Mechanism of flowering regulatory has become one of the hot research topics in plant molecular biology.Petunia is widely used in landscape beautification and as model plants in molecular biology.The research of their flowering transition has great significance in flower industry and having high value of botany theory.Previous studies demonstrated that NF-Y participated in the plant flowering process.To investigate the functions of PhNF-YC9,we selected the petunia ?violet? as experimental materials and analyzed the expression of PhNF-YC9 gene.In addition,using VIGS approach,we obtained the PhNF-YC9 silenced petunia plants and analyzed the blossom time and phenotype.The main results are as follows:1.We found that the cDN A of PhNF-YC9 includes 1174 bp and it contains the conserved domain of the NF-YC family.PhNF-YC9 expresses in leaf apical bud,stem and root and the highest expression level is in leaf apical bud.PhNF-YC9 protein was located in the nucleus and cytomenbrane.2.Physiological growth phenotype of transgenic petunia plant was reduced.We found that PhNF-YC9 silencing delayed the blossom time.Comparing with wild type plants,crown size of silenced petunia plants was smaller,and the lateral branch was elongation and the leaf color was shallow.3.The reason of the leaf color becoming shallow of silencing petunia plants is that chlorophyll content was reduced by 21%.4.Compared with the wild type plants,the expression of related-flowering gene PhFT,PhSOC1,PhSBP1 and PhSBP2 declined significantly.This demonstrated that PhNF-YC9 is involved in the flowering regulatory network and related to the Aging pathway.