The incredible diversity of floral color and pattern in nature is largely determined by the transcriptional regulation of anthocyanin and carotenoid biosynthetic genes. While the transcriptional control of anthocyanin biosynthesis is well understood, little is known about the factors regulating the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway in flowers. Here, we characterize the Reduced Carotenoid Pigmentation 2 (RCP2) locus from two monkeyflower (Mimulus) species, the bumblebee-pollinated M. lewisii and hummingbird-pollinated M. verbenaceus. We show that loss-of-function mutations of RCP2 cause drastic down-regulation of the entire carotenoid biosynthetic pathway in these species. Through bulk segregant analysis and transgenic experiments, we have identified the causal gene underlying RCP2, encoding a tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR) protein that is closely related to the Arabidopsis Reduced Chloroplast Coverage (REC) proteins. RCP2 appears to regulate carotenoid biosynthesis independently of RCP1, a previously identified R2R3-MYB master regulator of carotenoid biosynthesis. We show that RCP2 is required for chromoplast development and suggest that it most likely regulates the expression of carotenoid biosynthetic genes through chromoplast-to-nucleus retrograde signaling. Furthermore, we demonstrate that M. verbenaceus is just as amenable to chemical mutagenesis and in planta transformation as the more extensively studied M. lewisii, making these two species an excellent platform for comparative developmental genetics studies of two closely related species with dramatic phenotypic divergence.

A Tetratricopeptide Repeat Protein Regulates Carotenoid Biosynthesis and Chromoplast Development in Monkeyflowers (Mimulus)