Interesting thought, Warren.
I think I’d still like to try some straight bracteata, plus we have an ugly hill front in front of our house that it could cascade down. Anyone got any clippings? Would be willing to test it out here in MD.
Max, do you want Clinophylla X Bracteata or straight Bracteata? Both are here on the hill.
I was just thinking, all of you science people over in the US, get some of the RRD plants put it in solution being polar and nonpolar and run it through HPLC. Try and isolate the hormone responsible for the rapid growth and you might come up with some new fantangled growth hormone for horticulture and agriculture.
Warren, your proposal is not far removed from how GA was discovered. A fungus in Japanese rice farms caused rice plants to shoot up, flop over and die from “foolish seedling disease”. The fungus was eventually (in 1930’s) shown to cause the production of a chemical, Gibberellic Acid – the cause of the rapid shoot elongation. I would expect that RRD does something similar. Other fungal pathogens have been shown to cause witches brooming though Gibberellic synthesis.
Warren or others in the know, can you tell me what the letters stand for please,
plants put it in solution being polar and nonpolar and run it through HPLC.
HPLC originally meant high pressure liquid chromatography. When they did some tricks to get the pressure down it was changed to high performance LC. Chromatography was originally defined as “separation of color”. the first experiments of note were done to separate the color pigments of plants and flowers. Tschwett, a Russian chemist (spelling?) did this. Sugar or starch can be used if the solvent is a fraction like kerosene or gasoline. Later a mixture of diatomaceous earth (swimming pool filter material), mixed with magnesium oxide, was used. That is really good for carotenes and is the classic method for their determination, with acetone and Skellysolve (hexanes/heptanes) as the solvents.
Now there are thousands of different support matrices, and solvent formulas for all kinds of chemicals. Most of them don’t have much if any visible color, so we have to use instruments with ultraviolet detection. Very fine particles of silica, often coated with something, serves as the matrix in typical HPLC columns. These allow you to separate things in minutes instead of hours or days. They also scale down the amount so that you can look at the contents of a single seed, instead of a whole bucket of them.
I think Warren was suggesting that we should try to measure changes in things like GA, ABA, auxin, kinetin. Actually I think there are already some papers that describe the hormonal changes that occur in RRD. But to my way of thinking what is really important is why some roses are more resistant to the vector (insect?) than others. Things with multiflora in background often have trouble. I have lost plants with RRD ever since the early 1980s. Never very many in a year. I recall Crimson Rambler, Seafoam, Garden Party, and of course wild multiflora in the area.
Thanks for the explanation Larry and in a way I can understand it. Well worded.
Larry about measuring the changes is not what I was trying to explain but leave it at that. Stratified the first lot of Mermaid crosses today, the cross is a rose of mine called Arahan big semidouble
[attachment 366 arahan01.jpg]
This I pollinated with Memaid, Arahan throws a lot of single/semidoubles, I am guessing it will give one awesome single.
That’s quite pretty, Warren. It reminds me much of the old Chaplin HT Innocence.