Interestingly, natural polymorphisms in intron 6 (INT6+) led to about fourfold differences in the abundance of FLM-ß, which could, as predicted by the linear model, relate to a flowering time delay by 28.8 leaves, suggesting that INT6+ harbours extensive potential to fine-tune flowering (Figures 4 and 5). Importantly, this molecular effect appears to be mediated, in the case of INT6+CAA, by effects on the splicing efficiency and specificity at the distal intron 1. There, INT6+CAA promotes the formation of short intron 1-containing transcripts, at the expense of FLM-ß, that are likely subjected for degradation by nonsense-mediated decay (Figure 7) (Lutz et al., 2015).