Abstract
Liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha L.) proliferates by both sexually and asexually. Archegonia and antheridia are formed in sexual organs developed from thalli. It is known that sexual organ formation is promoted under long-day condition empirically. But little is known about this mechanism at molecular level. Recently, it is shown that arabidopsis FT protein and rice FT homolog (Hd3a) are florigen, which associates day length with flowering directly (Coupland et al. 2007, Shimamoto et al. 2007). So, we investigated a possibility that liverwort FT homologs control sexual organ formation under long-day condition. We isolated two FT homologs, and designated it MpFT1 (37% amino acid similarity to arabidopsis FT) and MpFT2 (42%). MpFT1 and MpFT2 are expressed in both thalli and sexual organ.
