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Research article2002Peer reviewedOpen access

FLOOZY of petunia is a flavin mono-oxygenase-like protein required for the specification of leaf and flower architecture

Tobeña-Santamaria, Rafael; Bliek, Mattijs; Ljung, Karin; Sandberg, Göran; Mol, Joseph N. M.; Souer, Erik; Koes, Ronald

Abstract

The mechanisms that determine the relative positions of floral organs, and thereby their numbers, is a poorly understood aspect of flower development. We isolated a petunia mutant, floozy (fzy), in which the formation of floral organ primordia in the outermost three floral whorls and one of the two bracts at the base of the flower is blocked at an early stage. In addition, fzy mutants fail to generate secondary veins in leaves and bracts and display a decreased apical dominance in the inflorescence. FZY encodes an enzyme with homology to flavin mono-oxygenases and appears to be the ortholog of YUCCA genes of Arabidopsis. FZY is expressed in young leafs and bracts and in developing flowers. In young floral meristems FZY is expressed in the center of the meristem dome and, later, expression becomes localized on the flanks of the initiating petal and stamen primordia and at several sites in maturing anthers and carpels. These findings indicate that FZY is involved in synthesizing a signaling compound that is required for floral organ initiation and specification of the vascularization pattern in leaves. Although fzy mutants contain normal auxin levels, ectopic expression of FZY results in excessive auxin accumulation, suggesting that the signaling compound is auxin.

Keywords

flavin mono-oxygenase; meristem initiation; flower development; vascularization; leaf development; transposon tagging

Published in

Genes and Development
2002, Volume: 16, number: 6, pages: 753-763
Publisher: COLD SPRING HARBOR LAB PRESS