Articles
Relationship between pollen formation and vase life in Arabidopsis thaliana
Article number
1336_7
Pages
47 – 54
Language
English
Abstract
In many flowering plants, pollination accelerates the aging of petals, leading the translocation of nutrients for seed generation.
This is important for plants to transmit genetic sources to the next generation, although it shortens the vase life of cut flowers in commercial use.
Pollen also cause decrease of cut flower value such as lily, because they are sticky thus pollute petals.
At some flower shops, they remove anthers (emasculation) to prolong the vase life and avoid pollution, but it changes the flower morphology and is a burden for shop workers.
One of the solutions for these problems is to generate cultivars with anthers but without pollens: they would be male sterile so have longer vase life, and would not pollute flowers with pollen.
Several male sterile mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana have been reported, but the relation between pollenless defects and vase life remained unclear.
We focused on two male-sterile mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana, aborted microspores (ams) and male sterile1 (ms1), and investigated the vase life of cut flowers, and found that they showed around 10 days longer vase life than the wild type.
Moreover, the cut flower of the mutants grew more than the wild type.
These results suggest that pollenless cultivars that can be generated by knockout of AMS or MS1 genes prolong vase life with little effects for the floral morphology.
Our findings lead to the novel technique to generate new cultivars in commercial flowers with improved vase life.
This is important for plants to transmit genetic sources to the next generation, although it shortens the vase life of cut flowers in commercial use.
Pollen also cause decrease of cut flower value such as lily, because they are sticky thus pollute petals.
At some flower shops, they remove anthers (emasculation) to prolong the vase life and avoid pollution, but it changes the flower morphology and is a burden for shop workers.
One of the solutions for these problems is to generate cultivars with anthers but without pollens: they would be male sterile so have longer vase life, and would not pollute flowers with pollen.
Several male sterile mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana have been reported, but the relation between pollenless defects and vase life remained unclear.
We focused on two male-sterile mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana, aborted microspores (ams) and male sterile1 (ms1), and investigated the vase life of cut flowers, and found that they showed around 10 days longer vase life than the wild type.
Moreover, the cut flower of the mutants grew more than the wild type.
These results suggest that pollenless cultivars that can be generated by knockout of AMS or MS1 genes prolong vase life with little effects for the floral morphology.
Our findings lead to the novel technique to generate new cultivars in commercial flowers with improved vase life.
Authors
E. Hitomi, S. Takeda
Keywords
aborted microspores (ams), anther, cut flower, male sterile1 (ms1), pollenless, stamen
Online Articles (53)