6 research outputs found
Flowering of kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa) is reduced by long photoperiods
Mature kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa âHaywardâ) vines grown under standard orchard management were exposed to 16-h photoperiods from the longest day in summer until after leaf fall in autumn. Photoperiod extension was achieved with tungsten halogen lamps that produced 2â8 ”mols mâ2 sâ1 photosynthetically active radiation. Long day treatments did not affect fruit dry matter or fruit weight at harvest during the growing season that the treatments were applied or during the following growing season. However, flowering was reduced by 22% during the spring following treatment application. As this reduction in flowering was not accompanied by a decrease in budbreak, the long day effect is not consistent with a delay in the onset of winter chilling. It is suggested therefore, that the observed reduction in flowering may be because of a diminution of floral evocation
Actinidia DRM1 - An intrinsically disordered protein whose mRNA expression is inversely correlated with spring budbreak in kiwifruit
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are a relatively recently defined class of proteins which, under native conditions, lack a unique tertiary structure whilst maintaining essential biological functions. Functional classification of IDPs have implicated such proteins as being involved in various physiological processes including transcription and translation regulation, signal transduction and protein modification. Actinidia DRM1 (Ade DORMANCY ASSOCIATED GENE 1), represents a robust dormancy marker whose mRNA transcript expression exhibits a strong inverse correlation with the onset of growth following periods of physiological dormancy. Bioinformatic analyses suggest that DRM1 is plant specific and highly conserved at both the nucleotide and protein levels. It is predicted to be an intrinsically disordered protein with two distinct highly conserved domains. Several Actinidia DRM1 homologues, which align into two distinct Actinidia-specific families, Type I and Type II, have been identified. No candidates for the Arabidopsis DRM1-Homologue (AtDRM2) an additional family member, has been identified in Actinidia