University of Tasmania, Australia

Comparative mapping of flowering genes and evaluation as candidates for flowering-related QTL in crop legumes.

Legumes are large group of plants that include important food crops such as pea, bean, soybean, lentil and chickpea, and forage crops including clovers and medics. As in many plants, successful production requires use of varieties that are adapted to a particular geographic area or cropping regime. Control of flowering time is an important component of this adaptation, and is an important target in breeding programs. Significant genetic variation for flowering time, photoperiod responsiveness and other related traits occurs in many crop legumes, and numerous quantitative trait loci (QTL) for these traits have been identified in groups around the world.

In recent years, there has been rapid development in understanding the molecular genetic pathways controlling flowering in model plants such as Arabidopsis and rice. There has also been a dramatic increase in the genomic resources for a number of model legumes, and significant new insight into the synteny that exists across crop and model legumes. In addition, a current ARC project based at UTAS has seen a large investment in isolation and functional analysis of flowering-related genes from pea.

This project will apply these recent advances to evaluate flowering gene homologs as positional candidates for QTL in several important crop legumes. This will involve the isolation, mapping, and expression analysis of flowering-related genes and the physiological characterization of flowering time variants. The project will also include an opportunity to visit collaborating research groups in other countries.