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Abstract

Plants do not bloom randomly--but how do they know when and where to make flowers? Here, we review molecular mechanisms that integrate spatial and temporal information in day-length-dependent flowering. Primarily through genetic analyses in two species, Arabidopsis thaliana and rice, we today understand the essentials of two central issues in plant biology: how the appropriate photoperiod generates an inductive stimulus based on an external coincidence mechanism, and the nature of the mobile flowering signal, florigen, which relays photoperiod-dependent information from the leaf to the growing tip of the plant, the shoot apex.