National Chung Hsing University Decrypts the Mystery of Orchid Flower Color and Aging Published in Nature Communications Mar. 02, 2021
The team led by Chair Professor/Vice President Chang-Hsien Yang, Graduate Institute of Biotechnology, National Chung Hsing University, proposed the "perianth code" (referred to as the P code) five years ago, which identified the mechanism controlling orchid lip formation. Recently, the team further discovered that the B and AGL6 MADS genes in the SP and L complexes of the "perianth code", in addition to their original important functions of determining the identity of the lip/sepal/petal in the floral organs, actually also have the multiple new functions of regulating the flower color, sepal and petal senescence and pedicel abscission. The results of this research have been published online on February 10th in Nature Communications, a series journal of the Nature.