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Auxin

Exploiting Fasciation Contagion

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So its well known that some bacteria, fungi, and viruses can induce fasciation and in lab settings these critters have been isolated, characterized, and tested on tissue cultures. What about real world 'in the field' exploitation of them, any successes?

I'm curious because I believe I may have encountered such a pathogen :scratchhead:

This spring a radicchio went cristate, all growing into spirals and stuff. Then the two next to it did. Then I started seeing fasciated flowers on my zucchini bushes 20 feet away. Then it was fasciated styles in capsicum flowers.

If some invisible little critter is doing this I want to harness it before it wanders off so I can use it, mainly on cacti if its compatible. Inventing practical methods of doing so without a microbiology laboratory is the interesting part.

My current attempt is quite basic. I took a fan shaped flower-stem end from a strongly effected radicchio plant, sprinkled it with water and ground to a paste with a mortar and pestle, mixed that up in water and used it to soak Hylocereus undatus seeds, Flax seeds, and washed Tomato seeds straight from a tomato. For the first two, after several hours, I planted them just by pouring the juice and seed slurry into appropriate soil. The tomato seeds are an attempt to preserve it, I poured off the liquid and dried them.

I'll be quite pleased if such a crude procedure works on even 1% of the treated seeds.

What would be ways to improve the concept?

Expose seeds and then rapidly increase tempt to give fungi and bacteria a better chance to get into the seeds?

Expose already germinating seeds or small seedlings?

Put a drop on a cactus baby and poke the tip with a fine pin? lol

I've seen fasciating pathogens in trees a few times before, but never anything like this where it seems to jump from chicory family to cucurbits and possibly even solanum family.

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as far as i know the cause of fasciation is still disputed & not very well understood.. or has there been recent work done?

i work on an island that has a long history of industrial use. i started to worry if i was exposing myself to something i'd rather not when i noticed a few different acacia's & even weeds like Parietaria judaica (asthma weed) & inkweed (all very different plant families) started going fasciated like crazy..

i'm not sure how to help with what you want to do, in my little bit of research at the time it basically came up that they think it could be viral, but also that it could be a response to toxic contamination of some sort & that they really don't know much about it.. possible i just didn't research hard enough though ..

fasciation does look pretty weird & cool, though my first reaction wasn't positive as i breathe in a shit load of this soil on a daily basis.. seemed a bit dodgy..

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Yeah, I live downstream of a nuke plant thats leaking so bad the cleanup efforts may pass a trillion dollars in costs so I can relate.

There are identified pathogens that do it, Rhodococcus fascians comes to mind (note the species name) it can produce cytokinin and auxin and induce an antigibberellin effect in infected tissues.

It could be my plants got mutated just by random insect damage or the department of energys incompetence, but lacking any proof I'm gonna play with this thing B)

Even a remote chance of being able to induce crests in seeds of known genetics is worth the effort.

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o.k. Well since the pollen of fasciated cacti produces a pretty high percentage of fasciated seedlings. It can be assumed that it is something that is transferable via pollen? So wat things can be in or attatch themselves to pollen? In this list Surely the asnwer must lie.

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I was ponderin on that last night. If the mutation in my plants really did spread from (flowering) radicchio to cucurbits it must have been either air borne or in little shreds of dead leaves, it couldnt have been water-borne unless it came in via my irrigation water. Its not hard to imagine that fungal spores, viruses, or endosporulating bacteria could ride the pollen looking for damaged plant tissues to infect.

Just to be thorough I'll cryo-store some dessicated pollen and mix some with capsicum pollen for a capsicum selfing to see if the progeny mutate.

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