Abstract
It has been reported that the Arabidopsis mutants defective in the vip6/elf8 gene show early-flowering phenotype, because the PAF1 complex, which contains VIP6/ELF8 protein as a component, is required to activate the expression of the flowering repressor FLC (Oh et al., 2004; He et al., 2004). However, in our experiments using several independent T-DNA insertion lines from Salk and Kazusa, all antibiotic-resistant seedlings were hetero, suggesting that homo mutants were embryo-lethal. Thereafter, it was found that, although quite rarely, homo mutant plants did appear. They were dwarf, and had thin stems, small cauline leaves and more flowers than wild type plants. Though they got old earlier, they did not produce any seeds. Morphologically abnormal flowers were often seen, such as those with white-margined sepals, undeveloped petals, short stamen filaments, and green anthers without any pollen development inside. These results suggest that the gene is essential for sexual reproduction.
