FD and vegetative development

Perennial plants alternate between periods of active growth and periods of dormancy. Prerequisite to bud dormancy is the formation of an apical bud. Short day photoperiod in the fall induces bud formation in poplar. Transgenic plants overexpressing the bZIP transcription factor FD do not stop growing and do not form a bud. In order to better understand the molecular events leading to bud formation, we used microarrays to compare the transcriptomes of shoot tips of poplars overexpressing FD and wild type plants (1) grown under long day conditions and (2) collected after 3 weeks under short day conditions Shoot tips of poplar plants were collected under LD and after 3 weeks under SD when bud forms in wild type plants. Shoot tips were collected from 4 plants and pooled. 3 replicates/genotype/time point