Abscission of floral parts from the main body is a widespread process in plants. The shedding takes place at the site termed abscission zone (AZ). To date, the molecular and cellular mechanisms controlling AZ differentiation remain largely unknown.

NtBOP2, a tobacco homolog of Arabidopsis BOP (blade-on-petiole), has been functionally characterized by Prof. XIA Guixian’sgroup in the State Key Laboratory of Plant Genomics, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that antisense suppression of NtBOP genes in tobacco caused a failure in corolla shedding, and the underlying cause for this phenomenon was a block in the differentiation of the corolla abscission zone due to maladjusted cell elongation.

They further demonstrated that NtBOP2 mediated the differentiation of AZ architecture by regulating the longitudinal cell elongation at the AZ region and it might fulfill such a function through interaction with the TGA transcription factors. These results revealed the crucial role of NtBOP2 in tobacco corolla AZ differentiation and provided a new insight into the genetic manipulation of floral shedding in agricultural or horticultural crops.

This work has been published online in Plant Physiology, with WU Xiaomin, a Ph.D. student in Prof. XIA’s group, as the first author. This research was supported by the National Basic Research Priorities Program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The paper can be accessed at: http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/early/2012/04/05/pp.112.193482.abstract