Formation of Corymb-like Inflorescences Due to Delay in Bolting and Flower Development in the corymbosa2 Mutant of Arabidopsis

Among the wild-type ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana whose shape of inflorescence is categorized as raceme, the ecotype Landsberg harboring the erecta (er) mutation shows a corymb-like inflorescence, namely, a compact inflorescence with a flattened arrangement of flower buds at the tip. The fact that the ER gene encodes a receptor-like protein kinase implies the presence of a signaling cascade responsible for the inflorescence morphology of flowering plants. We report here the characterization of another mutant with a corymb-like inflorescence, named corymbosa2 (crm2), and the isolation of the CRM2 gene. While the er mutation causes a severe reduction in the length of pedicels, the crm2 mutation results in a significant delay in the initiation of internode elongation and in the development of flowers, despite having little effect on the timing of floral induction. Consequently, the number of flower buds is apparently increased at the tip of crm2 inflorescence. The crm2 er double mutant shows an additive phenotype. These results suggest that CRM2 and ER may act in different ways to generate wild-type inflorescence. The CRM2 gene was isolated by positional cloning and appears to encode a polypeptide with no significant homology to known sequences.