The role of hormones on morphogenesis of thin layer explants from normal and transgenic tobacco plants

Abstract

The organogenic potential of thin layer stem explants of non‐reproductive tobacco plants was tested on a hormone‐free medium and under various hormonal conditions. A comparison was made between thin layers excised from normal and transgenic plants at the same developmental stage. The transgenic plants were transformed by insertion of TR‐ and TL‐DNA from Agrobacterium rhizogenes 1855 root‐inducing plasmid. The aim was to identify hormonal conditions capable of stimulating the expression of the flowering competence present in the differentiated stem tissues at the induced stage before any visible sign of transition to reproductive development. Flower neoformation, observed at the end of the culture period (day 25), occurred on untransformed thin layers only with kinetin treatment. Explants from transgenic plants showed flower bud regeneration on hormone‐free medium, indoleacetic acid alone (1 μM), kinetin alone (1 μM), and most abundantly on indoleacetic acid plus kinetin (1 μM each). No flower formation was observed on indolebutyric acid plus kinetin (10 μM and 0.1 μM, respectively) in both normal and transgenic explants. The latter treatment enhanced rooting instead, above all in the transgenic explants. On hormone‐free medium vegetative bud formation was well expressed both by untransformed and transgenic explants, and enhanced by the combined, equimolar concentrations of indoleacetic acid and kinetin.The results show that cytokinin allows flowering in florally determined stem explants from normal plants. In the transgenic explants, the flowering response increases when indoleacetic acid is added to cytokinin, thus suggesting a role for auxin in enhancing the expression of the florally determined state in thin cell layers of non‐reproductive plants.