In a paper published online in advance in Science this week, the University of Texas at Austin's Jae Bok Heo and Sibum Sung show that the long intronic non-coding RNA COLDAIR is a critical component for the vernalization-mediated epigenetic repression of the floral repressor FLC in Arabidopsis. COLDAIR, Heo and Sung write, "is required for establishing stable repressive chromatin at FLC through its interaction with [polycomb repressive complex 2]."