Previous studies showed that the flowering of Arabidopsis was regulated by four pathways, including autonomous pathway, vernalization pathway, gibberellic acid (GA)-dependent pathway and the photoperiod pathway. And CCA1 influenced the circadian rhythm, overexpression of CCA1 resulted in long hypocotyls and late flowering (Wang and Tobing 1998). CO involved in the photoperiod pathway in Arabidopsis and acted as a floral promoter, which was regulated by the circadian clock (Yano et al. 2000). The temporal and spatial regulation of CO turned out to be important to the photoperiod-dependent induction of flowering (An et al. 2004). Early in a day, the expression of CO was low, then increased rapidly 10 h after dawn and peaked at around 15 h (Suárez-López et al. 2001). LFY is a major floral meristem regulator, its overexpression caused early flowering in transgenic Arabidopsis (Benlloch et al. 2007). A single PHYA gene, LHY gene and three CCA1 genes involved in the photoperiod pathways showed more highly expressed in the vegetative buds than in the flower buds. Two VRN genes playing important roles in the vernalization pathway were detected in our study, and were found to be more highly expressed in the vegetative buds than in the flower buds. Besides, DEGs related to the autonomous pathway were also detected, including two FCA genes, a FLD gene and a FY gene. qRT-PCR revealed that expression of LFY was higher in the vegetative buds and expression of CO, SOC1, CCA1 was higher in the flower buds, which was consistent with the RNA-Seq data (Fig. 8g–j). Expression of CCA1 was significantly higher in the flower buds than the vegetative buds. This observation suggesting that the mechanism of flowering regulation in C. faberi might be similar to Arabidopsis.