Plants are biochemical wonders that give us many things that we use so ubiquitously in our daily lives that we don't even notice it.  These include textiles, medicines, and oxygen, among many other things.  Perhaps the benefit that we most directly notice in our lives is that plants give us energy. 

For humans, plants are food, and we get not only vegetables, but those amazing carbs.  If you really stop to think about it, humans really consume a huge amount of plant-based carbohydrates:  syrup, sugar, bread, pasta, rice, tortillas for those sweet, sweet breakfast tacos...carbs are at the bottom of the food pyramid for a reason!  For many of the top food crops, these carbohydrates are the result of processing seeds from certain plant sources – think grains of rice, wheat, or corn kernels.  And each one of these grains is the result of a miniscule yet breathtaking spark of sexual reproduction in these plants.  And this sexual reproduction takes place where the ovaries and stamen are in a plant.  And this part, the sexiest of all the plant parts, is…you guessed it.  The flower.  Farmers have known for a very long time that for us to get those delicious grains, we need flowers and we need them to reproduce successfully. 

More recently, crop plants have generated interest in their potential to not only fuel our bodies, but to fuel our world as bioenergy.  And, not surprisingly, flowering time affects how much viable biomass we can get from these plants - short, early flowering plants are better for grain, and tall, later flowering varieties are better for biofuels.   So,  there has been a big push to figure out what makes crop plants flower when they do.

And, as it turns out, basically EVERYTHING influences flowering...