Abscisic acid regulates plant growth and flowering through SINGLE FLOWER TRUSS pathway in tomato.
Abscisic acid (ABA) regulates seed and bud dormancy. We show by forward and reverse genetic analysis that the tomato transcription factor SlZFP2 is required for release of bud and seed dormancy through negative regulation of ABA biosynthesis. We also demonstrated that ABA promotes growth and represses flowering in tomato both through transcriptional control on the florigen-encoding gene SINGLE FLOWER TRUSS (SFT) in tomato. To gain further insight on transcriptome changes by overexpresion of HA-SlZFP2, we sequenced two lines of p35S:HA-SlZFP2 in LA1589 background and their nontransgenic siblings on Illumina Hiseq2000 platform. Overall design: Two homozygous transgenic lines 103 and 104 showing very similar phenotypes in flowering and branching were chosen for profiling gene expression via RNA sequencing. Their respective nontransgenic siblings were served as controls (103N and 104N).