Why Plants Need Winter: The Science of Seasonal Timing

[All talks are free to attend.] How do organisms extract timing information from noisy environments? Plants are masters at using winter's naturally varying temperatures to judge seasonal progression. Plants prevent flowering in autumn by producing a floral brake (a transcriptional repressor called FLC). Winter temperatures epigenetically silence FLC gradually releasing this brake with an epigenetic memory mechanism also found in humans. Rather than a specific thermosensor, multiple facets of…