In message , Nick Maclaren
writes

In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| It turns out that the problem is that its pollen doesn't germinate;
| that of some other species does (in I. learii flowers), but doesn't
| get far down the tube. I enquired in a few quarters if there were
| any good descriptions of the physiology of germination in vascular
| plants, and got my usual deafening silence. It is a topic that is
| rather beyond mere undergraduate courses :-)
|
| Not that it's a subject on which I am informed, but I was rather
| surprised to hear that your received a response of deafening silence.
| Assuming that you're talking about pollen germination, rather than seed
| germination, there's a review article at
|
| http://www.bio.umass.edu/hepler/PDF's/Taylor%20and%20Hepler_AnnuRevPPPmol
| biol_1997_48_461.pdf

uk.rec.gardening beats sci.bio.botany :-)

Thanks very much! That is the best one I have seen and I have stored it
for reading later, though I was really hoping for more on the physiology
as distinct from the biochemistry. Most books seem to spend more time on
the equivalent stages of mosses than vascular plants, perhaps because they
are easier to investigate and were studied first.

One question arising from that, which I have been puzzled about for some
years, is a pollen tube part of the receiving flower, or grown from the
pollen grain? Most advanced books assume that you know that, and most
elementary ones don't get that far ....

From http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/91/1/49

"Two microtubule (MT) cytoskeletal systems coexist in the tubes of
bicellular angiosperm pollens, one in the vegetative (tube) cell of the
male gametophyte and the other in the generative cell within it."

Google Scholar is your friend.

Never having been in a single biology lesson in my life, I have never been
taught such things :-)

| There's hints on the web that I. learii is self-incompatible and the
| cultivated populations clonal, but I didn't find anything particularly
| clear.

I found one clear paper that I summarised above. I am not sure that I
could find it again!


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

--
Stewart Robert Hinsley