Browsing by Subject "woodland strawberry"

Plant hormones (phytohormones) are important substances that regulate physiological processes like fruit development in plants. Auxin, cytokinins and gibberellins are thought to be the most important phytohormones during fruit development. The aim of this work was to investigate whether auxin affects the temporal and spatial patterns of cytokinin during fruit development of woodland strawberry. Additionally, this work also examined the effect of auxin on the fruit development from morphological point of view. F. vesca plants transformed with TCSn:VENUS-H2B cytokinin reporter construct were used as plant material. Three different treatments were used: pollination, emasculation and auxin application after emasculation. Developmental stages S1-S5 and S9 (S1 at flower opening, S2 two days after that, further stages every third day except S9 22 days after flower opening) were observed. In the morphological analysis, the fruits (receptacles) were weighted and measured. The analysis of cytokinin pattern was done by observing the expression of VENUS fluorescent protein using confocal microscopy. The results showed that the treatments influenced fruit morphology. The emasculated receptacles had very minimal growth, pollinated grew into normal fruits and auxin treated developed similar to the pollinated. The distribution and amount of cytokinin differed between the treatments. The auxin treated and pollinated samples showed more cytokinin signal in the pith and cortex tissues than the emasculated samples. The vascular tissue showed clear cytokinin signal among all treatments in the earlier (S1-S3) stages. Conclusion was that exogenous auxin application impacts the cytokinin pattern within the receptacles in a manner similar to pollination. In addition, it was confirmed that auxin is needed for proper fruit development in woodland strawberry. In future, it would be interesting to study the effect of cytokinin on auxin, to gain more information about the interaction of these two phytohormones.