bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/178772; this version posted September 21, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Flax latitudinal adaptation at LuTFL1 altered architecture and promoted fiber production. 2 Rafal M Gutaker1,2, Maricris Zaidem2, Yong-Bi Fu3, Axel Diederichsen3, Oliver Smith1,4 , 3 Roselyn Ware1, Robin G Allaby1* 4 1. School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, United Kingdom CV4 7AL 5 2. Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany 6 3. Plant Gene Resources of Canada, Saskatoon Research and Development Centre, SK S7N 0X2, Canada 7 4. Centre for Geogenetics, Copenhagen University of Copenhagen, 1307 Copenhagen K, Denmark 8 Corresponding author
[email protected] bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/178772; this version posted September 21, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. 9 Abstract 10 After domestication in the Near East around 10,000 years ago several founder crops, flax 11 included, spread to European latitudes. On reaching northerly latitudes the architecture of 12 domesticated flax became more suitable to fiber production over oil, with longer stems, smaller 13 seeds and fewer axillary branches. Latitudinal adaptations in crops typically result in changes in 14 flowering time, often involving the PEBP family of genes that also have the potential to 15 influence plant architecture.