Caroline Dean, of the John Innes Centre at Norwich, studied the DNA of arabidopsis and found a gene called Frigida. This is the tiny piece of genetic machinery that stops the plant from flowering until after the winter. That effectively means you flower in the spring. That process is called vernalisation. That is a process breeders have used extensively in all sorts of crops, for example to generate winter wheat and spring wheat.
Winter wheat needs two or three months of cold temperature before flowering.
It can be sown in September or October and a nice warm week in November isn't suddenly going to generate flowering at the wrong time. Breeders have developed this trait both in cereals and vegetables. We decided to choose that as a topic and unpick that in arabidopsis. There are sets of genes that prevent flowering, and Frigida is just one of them. It is, however, the only one that delays flowering until after a cold spell.