Disabling one potato gene delays both flowers and tubers
Zhai Z, Liu Y, Li H, Sun W, Lang X
Crispr
The potatoes on your dinner plate form underground tubers on a strict internal clock, and this study shows breeders can't simply flip one gene to get faster harvests, the plant's timing system is far more tangled than expected.
Potato plants use an internal clock tied to day length to decide when to flower and when to start forming the tubers we eat. Researchers used gene editing to switch off a clock gene called StFKF1, expecting the plant to flower and tuber later or earlier based on how similar genes work in other plants. Instead they got a surprise: tuber formation was delayed too, in a way that didn't match predictions, hinting that this gene's role in potato is more complicated than in well-studied plants like Arabidopsis.
Key Findings
CRISPR/Cas9 knockout of StFKF1 produced homozygous mutant potato lines with a distinct diurnal expression pattern under light/dark cycles
Under long-day conditions, StFKF1 knockout plants showed significantly delayed flowering and, unexpectedly, delayed tuber formation rather than earlier tuberization
Mutant plants had reduced single-plant yield with unchanged tuber number per plant, alongside altered expression of florigen gene StSP3D, tuberigen gene StSP6A, and upregulated StGI
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists disabled a light-sensing gene in potato plants and expected earlier flowering and tuber formation, but got the opposite: both were delayed, revealing the gene's role is more complex than predicted.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Loss-of-function of StFKF1 delays flowering and tuberization under long-day conditions in potato.
As key components of the diurnal oscillation pathway, FKF1 family genes are well known to promote flowering under inductive photoperiods in model plants, yet their biological function in potato flo...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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The potato is a starchy tuberous vegetable native to the Americas that is consumed as a staple food in many parts of the world. Potatoes are underground stem tubers of the plant Solanum tuberosum, a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae.