Hormones and Soluble Sugars Contents Comparision on Cucumber Cultivars with Different Inflorescence Growth Habit
Martin Kagiki Njogu
*
Department of Plant Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, Chuka University, P.O. Box 106-60400, Chuka, Kenya and State Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics and Germplasm Enhancement, College of Horticulture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China.
Diana Mwende Murithi
Department of Plant Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, Chuka University, P.O. Box 106-60400, Chuka, Kenya.
Joyce Wambura Manda
Department of Plant Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, Chuka University, P.O. Box 106-60400, Chuka, Kenya.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
In flowering plants, the arrangement of flowers on a stem becomes an inflorescence, and a huge variety of inflorescence architecture occurs in nature. Inflorescence architecture also affects crop yield. Cucumber (Cucumis sativa L) possesses two types of stem growth habits. One type is the indeterminate stem, in which the terminal bud continues the vegetative activity of shoot apical meristem (SAM) during most of the growing season; the second type is the determinate stem, in which the vegetative activity of SAM ceases when it becomes a terminal flower. This research is important as it contribute to crop production by clarifying how plant hormones and total soluble sugars influence the development of different inflorescence architectures in Cucumis sativa, Understanding the physiological differences between determinate and indeterminate growth habits can support the development of improved cucumber varieties with higher yields and better flowering patterns. The study also provides valuable insights into the complex regulation of the shoot apical meristem, a key process in plant developmental biology. The study was carried out at Nanjing agricultural university (cucumber laboratory) to investigate the variation of plant hormones and total soluble sugars on cucumber varieties with different inflorescence growth habit, two cucumber varieties (CUS82 and CUS226) with determinate and CCMC with indeterminate inflorescence were used. Shoot tips and stem samples were collected in three replicates at different stages, each replicate included 10 and 5 plants for the shoot tip and the stem sample respectively. Plant hormones (Gibberellic acid, Cytokinin, Indole Acetic Acid) and total soluble sugars contents were determined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) technique. All statistical analyses were performed using STATISTICA version 6.0 (Stat Soft Inc., USA, 2001) package and graphs were generated using Graph prism. In this study, we highlight recent findings on the variation of plant hormones and TSS on cucumber varieties with different inflorescence architecture. Results shows that plant hormones and total soluble sugars contents on both shoot tip and stem varies significantly between the cucumber varieties with different inflorescence at various stages of plant growth, however relationship between hormones and TSS with physiological and regulation mechanism of inflorescence growth habit is not well understood and therefore further research is needed to relate how hormones and TSS affect the genes or the pathways that regulate terminal flower formation.
Keywords: Cucumis sativus L, Determinate growth, Indeterminate growth, terminal flower, shoot apical meristem, plant hormones, total soluble sugars