The Inheritance of Plural-pistillate Flowering in Cucumber

Abstract

While standard-type cucumbers usually bear a single pistillate flower (SP) on each pistillate node, there are variants that bear double pistillate flowers (DP) and multiple pistillate flowers (MP) per node. Genetical analysis of SP, DP and MP was carried out by examining the sex expression of F₁, F₂ and of the BC lines obtained from crossing these plants.
Our results showed that this flowering character was controlled by multiple alleles and that less pistillate flowering was dominant or incompletely dominant over more pistillate flowering. The locus controlling this character was named pf, and the genes for SP, DP and MP were named pf⁺, pf^d and pf^m, respectively.