Albuquerque Journal

Article on flower study earns NMSU prof award
By Audry Olmsted, NMSU News Service

LAS CRUCES — A bouquet of flowers may be fragrant and beautiful to the eye but the beauty soon fades, leaving behind wilting petals.
       
Recognizing the challenges flower industries face in maximizing the longevity of cut flowers has won a local professor and two other research scientists a national publication award.
       
Geno A. Picchioni, a professor of horticulture at New Mexico State University, along with Wayne A. Mackay, of the University of Florida, and Mario Valenzuela-Vazquez, of the Universidad Aut��a de Ciudad JuᲥz, won the American Society for Horticultural Science Outstanding Ornamental Horticulture Publications Award for 2008.
       
Their article, “Correlative Supply and Demand Functions in Lupinus havardii: A Forgotten Side of Cut Flower Physiology?” introduces a new and possibly controversial concept in cut flower physiology known as correlative control.
       
What the researchers found through their studies is a correlation between flowers and agronomic crops, such as barley, maize and wheat.
       
Picchioni explained that in the correlative control process, a senescing, or dying, vegetative organ, such as a mature leaf, and an expanding reproductive structure, such as the grain, influence each other and coordinate the development of the other organ. In agronomy, this process plays a major role in determining grain protein concentration.
       
The researchers analyzed the Lupinus havardii, better known as the Big Bend bluebonnet, from the moment it was harvested to its sixth day of life postharvest.
      
 What they found is that the flower structures rapidly change their function from being a growing “sink” to being a resource provider.
       
Picchioni said that in the postharvest life of a cut flower, the lower flowers are giving way to the new buds and flowers on top.
      
 “It's one process at the expense of another,” he said.
       
Agronomists, Picchioni said, face a similar challenge pertaining to the grain yield/grain quality relationship.
       
The article and matching photograph ran in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science.
       
Picchioni said he was happy just to learn some months ago that the photo accompanying the story would be featured on the front page of the journal. He was very pleased though to learn of the national award.
      
 “I didn't see it coming. I had no idea,” he said. “It completely blew me away.”