Juvenility modification

Some fruit crops show a long juvenility period which delays reproductive development, making traditional cross-breeding difficult. Much research has been devoted to accelerating the flowering process and some genes controlling flower initiation in Arabidopsis have been identified (Yanotsky 1995; Simpson et al. 1999). Two of them, LEAFY (LFY) and APETALAI (API), were successfully used to transform Citrus seedlings (Pena et al. 2001), inducing flower initiation in one-year-old plantlets. Constant leafy and SPL3 were transferred in banana (Sagi et al. 1998).