Experiments in Antirrinum majus, Arabidopsis thaliana and Petunia hybrida have demonstrated that putative transcription factors of the so-called MADS-box family play an important role in determining floral organ identity. Such regulatory genes are transiently expressed in small numbers of cells in the floral apex. Here we describe the isolation of a cDNA from Nicotiana tabacum coding for a MADS-box protein which is expressed in both the floral and vegetative organs of the plant.