What is it about?
We analyzed hundreds of female flowers from 1 hour through 96 hours after pollination and followed the growth of pollen tubes until fertilization. A quantitative assessment of the regularity of the process is available. We also report that stigmas remain receptive for three days, a major finding because up to now it was common to uncover flowers one day after pollination (thus exposing flowers to undesirable pollinations)
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Why is it important?
Basic reproductive biology of many tropical crops is poorly understood. In the era of "omics" it is embarrassing how little we know abut basic biology of these crops. This subject is critical for the development of protocols for the production of doubled haploid or the induction of flowering which turned out to be critical for the proper implementation of genomic selection.
Perspectives
This article illustrates the need of the scientific community to better allocate resources for research. It is often the case that new molecular technologies attract all the interest and financial resources. This may be a reasonable strategy for "developed" crops (e.g. maize, rice, soybean, wheat, etc.) because basic knowledge in the biology of these crops has already been generated. That is not the case for "under developed" crops(typically from the tropics). As important it is to fill the vacuum in very basic information of these crops, donors and even the scientific community at large fail to understand this problem is.
Hernan Ceballos
Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reproductive biology in cassava: stigma receptivity and pollen tube growth, Communicative & Integrative Biology, January 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/19420889.2019.1631110.
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