It’s been an unseasonably warm spring this year. People walking down my street in cutoffs and sitting out on patios, soaking up some rays, has happened more often in the past week than I ever remember happening in the month of March. The flower box precariously placed outside my window by my landlord was blooming three weeks ago for Pete’s sake.And apparently I’m not the only one to notice a torrent of early bloomers this year, along with the stream of jorts and sunglasses that seemed to start popping up at the end of February. And while it’s not entirely uncommon for a warm day or two to prompt plants to burst into bloom only to be wiped out by a brief return of frosty days, the larger question of how climate change screws up plants’ natural cycle has scientists particularly worried.Luckily, folks over at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), have taken it up on themselves to figure out why temperature change so strongly affects plants flowering cycles and how we can work with it since, let’s face it, we’re at least partly responsible for some recent wacky climate patterns.As for why the mechanism behind plants flowering is so dependent on temperature patterns, scientists from the John Innes Centre will be publishing research in Nature pinpointing the interaction to a single gene called P1F4 and a molecule called florigen. Florigen has long been known to trigger flowering in plants, specifically in relation to longer daylight hours, but how this exactly is related to temperature has remained unknown. The new research now places responsibility on P1F4, which activates flowering pathways by binding with florigen, but only at specific temperatures.Dr. Phil Wigge, the lead scientist of the study, believes these findings help explain why our gradens started blooming in February, once the sunglasses came out. “Our findings explain at the molecular level what we observe in our gardens as the warmer temperatures of spring arrive,” he said.This new information has large implications for humans understanding how climate change affects a fundamental aspect of fauna. It may also give us a glimmer of hope for saving our food crops and other plant life if shit really hits the fan and global warming hits full force, as many have been predicting for years. Dr. Wigge and his team hope that by understanding how climate change affects plants blooming at a molecular and genetic level, we will be able to deal with larger issues such as future food security by exploring ways to genetically modify plants in order to compensate for warmer temperatures earlier in the year.Granted, at that point we may be dealing with other issues such as giant tsunamis and tornados, and our crop fields will probably be too flooded to grow food anyways. Also, depending on a global supply of genetically modified food and plant stuffs will most likely bring its own challenges and problems.But hey, in case we do develop space pods to encase huge portions in civilization sized terrariums to protect human populations, maybe this information will be to our advantage. Still, like learning mechanics, photosynthesis, or gravity, the new research is quite comforting. It means that in the end, there is a molecular explanation for everything. Even for flowers blooming early in spring.
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