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Cucumis plants such as melon and cucumber can produce male, female, and monoclinous flowers by selective arrest of spore-bearing organs at the early stages of flower development. The transcription factor WIP1 is the gynoecious (G) gene acting as a core carpel inhibitor that controls female flower development in cucurbits, although its role in the direct regulation of carpel determinacy has been unclear. Publishing in Science, Zhang et al. identified a carpel identity gene CRABS CLAW (CRC) in melon, and they showed that WIP1 recruits a corepressor TOPLESS (TPL) to the CRC promoter to suppress its expression by histone deacetylation, delaying floral stem cell termination in male flowers.
By using a sex transition mutant, the authors mapped and validated a single gene coding Crabs Claw (CRC) controlling female flower developing into males in melon. Interestingly, the authors also found that CRC was also involved in WUS-mediated floral meristem determinacy pathway, which was regulated by the YUC or TRN2 gene.
The researchers showed that WIP1 is a direct repressor of CRC expression. They also found that the N-terminal domain of WIP1 interacted with the LisH, CTLH, and CRA domains of TPL proteins to repress CRC expression. Additionally, mutations in WIP1-TPL interacting domains lead to expression of CRC and femaleness. These results suggest that WIP1-TPL complex promotes male flower development by impairing CRC function in the carpel primordia of melon.
Figure 1.
Melon female flower. (Photo by Bin Liu)
Original reference: Science
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add4250
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The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
- Copyright: © 2022 by the author(s). Published by Maximum Academic Press, Fayetteville, GA. This article is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Liu B. 2022. Decoding the WIP1-drived carpel determinacy pathway. Vegetable Research 2:19 doi: 10.48130/VR-2022-0019
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