Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information. Photoperiod-measuring mechanisms allow organisms to anticipate seasonal changes to align reproduction and growth with appropriate times of the year. This review provides historical and modern context to studies of plant photoperiodism.
We describe how studies of photoperiodic flowering in plants led to the first theoretical models of photoperiod-measuring mechanisms in any organism. We discuss how more recent molecular genetic studies in Arabidopsis and rice have revisited these concepts. We then discuss how photoperiod transcriptomics provides new lessons about photoperiodic gene regulatory networks and the discovery of noncanonical photoperiodmeasuring systems housed in metabolic networks of plants.
This leads to an examination of nonflowering developmental processes controlled by photoperiod, including metabolism and growth.
Finally, we highlight the importance of understanding photoperiodism in the context of climate change, delving into the rapid latitudinal migration of plant species and the potential role of photoperiod-measuring systems in generating photic barriers during migration. Keywords: photoperiod, external coincidence, metabolic daylength measurement system, noncanonical photoperiod measurement, photosynthetic photoperiod.
Plants rely on this predictable variation to optimize their life with seasonal progression. Although phenomena such as seasonal reproduction in animals or seasonal disorders in humans have long been known, progress in research on photoperiod has been largely driven by studies in plants 45 , 71 , They coined the term photoperiodism for this dependence on the relative duration of day and night.
