Floricultural traits and transposable elements in the Japanese and common morning glories

The Japanese morning glory has an extensive history of genetic studies and over 200 different spontaneous mutant lines have been described. Of these, we identified that two mutable alleles, flecked and speckled, for flower variegations are caused by integration of transposable elements, belonging to the En/Spm family, into the DFR-B and CHI genes for flower pigmentation, respectively. The mutable flaked allele of the common morning glory bearing variegated flowers is caused by insertion of a new transposable element, Tip100, into one of the CHS genes for pigmentation and that Tip100 belongs to the Ac/Ds family. These results are discussed with regard to spontaneous transposon mutagenesis and generation of floricultural traits of morning glories.