Characterization of in L.

Unlabelled: L., which includes Chinese cabbage, turnip, and pak choi, has more complex flowering time regulation than does due to the presence of multiple paralogous flowering time genes. () is one of the key genes regulating the flowering time, and has four paralogs. on the reference genome is deemed a pseudogene because of a mutation (from G to A) in the splice site of the third intron, but there are some accessions with a G nucleotide in the splice site. In this study, we genotyped 310 accessions and found that 19 had homozygous and 81 had heterozygous putative functional alleles. Accessions of turnip showed the highest proportion with a functional allele. BrFLC5 acts as a floral repressor when overexpressed in . The expression level varied in pre-vernalized plants, and this transcriptional variation was not associated with the G/A polymorphism in the third intron. Three accessions having a higher expression in pre-vernalized plants had a 584-bp insertion in the promoter region. Many regions homologous to this 584-bp sequence are present in the genome, and this 584-bp inserted region has tandem duplications of an AT-rich sequence in its central region. The possibility that a high expression of a functional could contribute to producing premature bolting-resistant lines in vegetables is discussed.

Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11032-023-01405-0.