The potato crop is one of the most important crops for human nutrition. In spite the relevance of the potato, the mechanism used by the potato plant to form tubers has not been fully elucidated to date. At the end of the last century, jasmonates were found to play a role in potato plant development. Jasmonates were first found to induce in vitro tuber formation in the dark, but attempts to reproduce this effect under photoperiod, either in vitro or in field grown plants, have been unsuccessful or inconclusive, their role in potato plant development remaining unestablished. The aim of the current work is to provide evidences on the relationship between jasmonates and the potato plant development, both vegetative development and tuberization. For this purpose, five assays, two in in vitro experimental systems and three with greenhouse growing plants were carried out.
Under any photoperiod tested, in vitro tuberization was very low; on the contrary, jasmonates enhanced the vegetative growth of the explants, particularly promoting root development; the in vitro experimental system having some constraints, as compared to whole plants, that could have interfered in the expression of the jasmonates' effects on potato plant development.
Results found in the greenhouse growing plants showed that jasmonates play an effective role in potato plant development. Under low inductive environmental conditions for tuberization, jasmonates reduced the root growth and increased the rate of stolons that had started to develop tubers. In addition, as photoperiod and temperature became increasingly inductive for tuberization, jasmonates also reduced shoot and increased tuber growth. Genotype had also a share in the response. The results presented in this work support the hypotheses that jasmonates play a central role in the development of potato plant.
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