Floral Quality Characterization in Olive Progenies from Reciprocal Crosses.

Despite the importance of flowering for fruit formation, it has been considered very little in breeding programs involving fruit species, including olives. We evaluated the principal morphological flower-quality components in the olive cultivars, 'Arbequina' and 'Picual', and in the progenies of their crosses. Wide ranges of variation were obtained for all the inflorescence traits and ovary tissue sizes. An analysis of variance indicated that the residual error was the main contributor to the inflorescence traits, except for the number of perfect flowers, underlining the need to evaluate adequate numbers of inflorescences for accurate measurements of these traits. However, the high repeatability obtained for the inflorescence traits suggests that simple evaluation procedures could be accurate enough for genotype characterization. The average values for 'Arbequina' were in the upper range for all the traits; the opposite occurred for 'Picual', and the values for most of the progenies were intermediate. No significant differences between the maternal and paternal effect on inheritance were found. Some interesting transgressive segregants showed a higher flower number, greater ovary and mesocarp size, or percentage of ovaries with all four fully developed ovules. The correlations among the parameters may have reflected a relatively consistent distribution of the ovaries' structural components and a close relationship between the ovaries and their mesocarp growth.

Fruit growth and sink strength in olive (Olea europaea) are related to cell number, not to tissue size.

The relationship between tissue (mesocarp and endocarp) growth and either tissue initial (i.e. in the ovary at bloom) size or cell number was studied using the olive cultivar Leccino (L) and its mutated clone (LC), which produces tetraploid fruits. LC ovaries were 2.7 times the volume of L ovaries, but contained an overall similar number of much larger cells. This allowed decoupling cell number and ovary size, which are normally closely correlated. With this decoupling, cell number in the ovary correlated with tissue growth in the fruit while tissue size in the ovary did not. Cell size in the ovary was inversely correlated with the tissue relative growth from bloom to harvest (i.e. the ratio between final and initial tissue size). These results support the hypothesis that cell number and not tissue size are related to fruit growth and sink strength, and that cell size in the ovary tissues is a good predictor of tissue growth, across cultivars and tissues, even when cell size is strongly affected by ploidy.