Jasmonate regulates male sterility in cucumber.
Liang H, Liu S, Yan T, Wang H, Li J, Chen H, Yang X, Zhou H, Li S, Yan J.
Plant Signaling
Cucumber breeders can now target a specific hormonal pathway to engineer male-sterile plants for hybrid seed production — meaning more disease-resistant, higher-yielding cucumbers at your farmers market, without workers having to hand-pollinate thousands of plants.
Plants make a natural chemical signal called jasmonate that acts like a fertility switch. When cucumber plants were bred to lack this hormone, their pollen died and their flowers refused to open — making the plants effectively sterile. Scientists mapped the exact chain of molecular middlemen connecting this hormone to healthy pollen, revealing how cucumbers 'decide' whether to reproduce.
Key Findings
Cucumber mutants unable to produce jasmonate developed ruptured, nonviable pollen and petals that failed to open, confirming jasmonate is essential for male fertility in this species.
Spraying mutant plants with a synthetic form of jasmonate (MeJA) fully rescued pollen viability and restored normal flower opening, demonstrating the effect is hormone-specific and reversible.
A three-step regulatory cascade was mapped: the protein CsMYC2 activates two WRKY transcription factors, which in turn suppress a cell-wall remodeling gene (CsXTH33), enabling normal stamen and pollen development.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers identified how a plant hormone called jasmonate controls pollen viability and flower opening in cucumbers. They traced a precise molecular chain of events linking this hormone to male fertility, offering a new target for breeding male-sterile cucumber varieties used in hybrid seed production.
Abstract Preview
Male sterility affects various agronomic traits. Although jasmonate (JA) has been shown to influence fertility in several plant species, most research on JA-mediated regulation of fertility has foc...
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The cucumber is a widely-cultivated creeping vine plant in the family Cucurbitaceae that bears cylindrical to spherical fruits, used as culinary vegetables. Considered an annual plant, there are three main types of cucumber—slicing, pickling, and seedless.