Exploring chamberless healing for small-scale production of grafted tomato transplants
Tian Gong is a PhD student in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida, USA. She completed her B.S. and M.S. at Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University in 2015. Her dissertation research project is focused on categorizing tomato rootstock and scion interactions. The rootstock impacts on tomato scion's vegetative growth and reproductive development, especially fruit yield and quality, can be complex. A detailed understanding of rootstock-scion synergy and underlying mechanisms is needed to optimize the overall performance of grafted tomato plants. Besides giving a talk on her work of tomato rootstock-scion interaction assessment, Ms. Gong presented "Exploring chamberless healing for small-scale production of grafted tomato transplants" during a poster session at the II International Symposium on Vegetable Grafting. She demonstrated a novel procedure toward simplifying the graft healing management to benefit small-scale operations. Compared with the standard procedure where grafted plants are healed in an enclosed area under high humidity for the first few days after grafting, the chamberless procedure did not decrease the graft survival rate and resulted in similar plant growth of grafted tomato seedlings. In addition, chamberless healing successfully prevented the emergence of adventitious roots around the graft union. Experiments are ongoing to refine this procedure using different tomato rootstock and scion combinations.
Tian Gong won the ISHS Young Minds Award for the best poster presentation at the II International Symposium on Vegetable Grafting in USA in July 2019.
Tian Gong, Horticultural Sciences Department, University of Florida, 2550 Hull Road, PO Box 110690, Gainesville, FL 32611-0690, USA, e-mail: tiangong@ufl.edu
The article is available in Chronica Horticulturae