Hormone Treatments during Maize Vegetative and Reproductive Development

Plant hormones are a group of organic natural compounds that can influence physiological processes when present at low concentrations. Plant biologists frequently use exogenous hormone application to modify plant physiology or to rescue mutants with defects in hormone pathways. There are a number of methods for these treatments, depending on the plant species, organs and tissues used for application, release path, among others. Here, we describe a simple method used for hormone treatment in maize plants. At the vegetative stage, we show the application of Gibberellic acid (GA₃) to wild type and dwarf1 (d1) mutants result in cell elongation (Evans et al., 1995). DWARF1 Encodes a Gibberellin 3-Oxidase enzyme (Chen et al., 2014), so the dwarf phenotype is rapidly recovered by GA₃ application. In addition, wild type plants show rapid stem elongation in response to GA₃ application. At the reproductive stage, we use our method to apply Jasmonic acid (JA) to a tasselseed2 (ts2) mutant tassel. TS2 suppresses carpels in the tassel and in lower florets in the ear and ts2 mutants can be rescued by exogenous JA application (DeLong et al., 1993). In addition to detailing the procedure for hormone treatments, we discuss potential issues and other aspects worth considering when performing these methods.

Maize

Hormones

Vegetative

Reproductive

Development