PLANT RESEARCH  CYNTHIA FAN


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TERMINAL FLOWER 1 at Ovary Project

Exhibition, 2025

Venue
Ovary Project, Shanghai

Date
December 2025A grass panicle
Found once in flower

TERMINAL FLOWER 1 (TFL1)
is a key regulator of flowering time

The first documentation of bamboo flowering can be found in the Classics of Mountains and Seas; in the earliest surviving copy from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), it simply reads:

“When bamboo flowers, it will wither.”

The phenomenon of flowering in bamboo is rare. Many species grow for decades without flowering, and when they eventually flower, it is often followed by a mass die-off of the whole population. Such observations are common in historical records on bamboo.

Bamboo flowering patterns can be categorised into four types:
  1. Sporadic – one or two clusters, or a scattering, is seen flowering
  2. Massive synchronised – more than half a population flowers at the same time
  3. Combined – sporadic and massive synchronised occurs simultaneously
  4. Partial flowering – a combination, with patchy distribution.1
At the molecular level, multiple copies of the TERMINAL FLOWER1 (TFL1) gene, responsible for maintaining prolonged vegetative growth, have been identified in bamboo. When a TFL1 gene from bamboo was overexpressed in Arabidopsis plants, flowering was significantly delayed, supporting its role in regulating flowering time.2

Clonal bamboo plants, which are genetically identical individuals, have been theorised to flower synchronously regardless of geographic location. This hypothesis has been partially supported by flowering records for the species Sasaella kogasensis “Aureostriatus” and suggests the presence of an internal biological clock that can persist for decades.3

A week after I wrote my first essay on flowering in bamboo, I walked past a bamboo flower for the first time.

References
  1. Zheng, X., Lin, S. Y., Fu, H. J., Wan, Y. W. & Ding, Y. L. (2020). The bamboo flowering cycle sheds light on flowering diversity. Frontiers in Plant Science, 11: 381.
  2. Zeng, H. Y., Lu, Y. T., Yang, X. M., Xu, Y. H. & Lin, X. C. (2015). Ectopic expression of the BoTFL1‑like gene of Bambusa oldhamii delays blossoming in Arabidopsis thaliana and rescues the tfl1 mutant phenotype. Genetics and Molecular Research, 14(3): 9306–9317.
  3. Wang, X., Zhang, X., Zhao, L. & Guo, Z. (2014). Morphology and quantitative monitoring of gene expression patterns during floral induction and early flower development in Dendrocalamus latiflorus. International Journal of Molecular Sciences 15: 12074–12093.


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