Plant axillary meristems are composed of highly organized, self-renewing stem cells that produce indeterminate branches or terminate in differentiated structures, such as the flowers. These opposite fates, dictated by both genetic and environmental factors, determine interspecific differences in the architecture of plants. The Cys(2)-His(2) zinc-finger transcription factor RAMOSA1 (RA1) regulat...

Flowering of Arabidopsis thaliana is induced by exposure to long days (LDs). During this process, the shoot apical meristem is converted to an inflorescence meristem that forms flowers, and this transition is maintained even if plants are returned to short days (SDs). We show that exposure to five LDs is sufficient to commit the meristem of SD-grown plants to flower as if they were exposed to c...

Phenotypic matches between plants and their pollinators often are interpreted as examples of reciprocal selection and adaptation. For the two co-occurring plant species, Heliconia bihai and H. caribaea in the Eastern Caribbean, we evaluated for five populations over 2 years the strength and direction of natural selection on corolla length and number of bracts per inflorescence. These plant trai...

Regulation of plant height, one of the most important agronomic traits, is the focus of intensive research for improving crop performance. Stem elongation takes place as a result of repeated cell divisions and subsequent elongation of cells produced by apical and intercalary meristems. The gibberellin (GA) phytohormones have long been known to control stem and internodal elongation by stimulati...

Flowering of Arabidopsis thaliana is induced by exposure to long days (LDs). During this process, the shoot apical meristem is converted to an inflorescence meristem that forms flowers, and this transition is maintained even if plants are returned to short days (SDs). We show that exposure to five LDs is sufficient to commit the meristem of SD-grown plants to flower as if they were exposed to c...

To understand the constraints on biological diversity, we analyzed how selection and development interact to control the evolution of inflorescences, the branching structures that bear flowers. We show that a single developmental model accounts for the restricted range of inflorescence types observed in nature and that this model is supported by molecular genetic studies. The model predicts ass...

Two Asteraceae species, Clibadium surinamense L. and Montanoa grandiflora D.C., were analyzed to determine the composition of the essential oil and to search for phototoxic compounds. Three parts of the plants were studied, inflorescence, stems and leaves. Intra and interspecific differences were found in the essential oil composition, which was determined by gas chromatography. In the chromato...

Objective: To describe Heliconia uxpanapensis x latispatha var. Karely, interspecific variety generated for cut flower based on commercial standards. Design/Methodology/Approach: Interspecific hand pollination was carried out between H. Gutiérrez Báez Benth. The female parent is endemic to Mexico; it presents compact growth due its pachymorphic rhizome, red and erect inflorescence, bracts in di...

Tomato plants harboring the ripening-inhibitor (rin) mutation yield fruits that fail to ripen. Additionally, rin plants display enlarged sepals and loss of inflorescence determinacy. Positional cloning of the rin locus revealed two tandem MADS-box genes (LeMADS-RIN and LeMADS-MC), whose expression patterns suggested roles in fruit ripening and sepal development, respectively. The rin mutation a...

The essential oil content in the inflorescence of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia Mill.) cultivated in the mid hills of Uttarakhand was found to be 2.8 % based o n the fresh weight. The oil was an alysed by capillary GC and GC– MS. Thirty seven constituents, representing 97.81 % of the o il were identified. The major components of the oil were linalyl acetate (47.56 %), linalool (28.06 %), lav...