Francesca Bellinazzo

Many plants use information on day length, which is sensed in the leaves, to time their flowering response at the shoot apical meristem (SAM). What makes this mechanism possible is a transmissible molecule called florigen, a small protein encoded by the gene FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT). Based on this knowledge, virus-induced flowering (VIF) can be applied to promote the change to the reproductive phase and to facilitate the breeding of plants with long juvenility or unsynchronized flowering time. In their study, Deng et al. (2024) describe a potato virus X (PVX)-based method to transiently deliver the florigen in tomato plants and thereby control their flowering time.

Red, orange, yellow, green, striped: many colourful and tasty tomatoes are currently on the market all over the world. These fascinating varieties are obtained by targeting specific units of a complex gene regulatory network (GRN) of transcription factors, which work in concert to regulate the downstream effectors of tomato fruit ripening. Through a multi-angle approach,Zhao et al. (2023)unravel the regulatory role of the bHLH transcription factor EMB1444-like in the process of tomato fruit ripening, expanding the potential for developing elite tomato varieties that combine high-quality organoleptic and shelf-life characteristics.