[en] Since the early 1990s, Arabidopsis thaliana has been studied as the species of choice of 'flowering geneticists'. Several pathways that either repress or promote flowering have been identified on the basis of (1) the flowering response of different genotypes to environmental factors (vernalization and photoperiod), (2) epistasis analyses, and (3) expression patterns of cloned genes in various backgrounds. Models attempting to include all information have been proposed repeatedly and their complexity is increasing with the bulk of data. In this review, we shall attempt to integrate into this genetical framework the physiological knowledge accumulated on a variety of plants by generations of researchers before the amost overnight breakthrough of Arabidopsis.
