Abstract
THE report of the Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution for the year 1940 has just been issued. The War has affected all the departments, the reduction in personnel by war service and the replacement of research work by the growing of vegetables and drug crops and seed production have dislocated some of the activities. Nevertheless, the results obtained from experiments on incompatibility, parthenocarpy, production of polyploidy in plums, cherries and pears, heterosis, polygenetics and linkage, provide useful and important data. The cytological department has found that cold treatment, colchicine and starving the nucleus of nucleic acid are excellent methods for analysing the behaviour of chromosomes during division. The preparation of a list of chromosome numbers of more than a thousand tropical species will be of great value to future workers. The identification of several plant pigments has been made by the Biochemistry Department. It has been found that both the ivory and yellow forms of Antirrhinum majus contain apigenin, and that the yellow pigment probably is chalkone. The yellow pigment in Papaver radicatum is gossypetin.
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John Innes Horticultural Institution. Nature 148, 252 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148252d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148252d0