I happen to be working on a project this summer that involves some stuff
you might be interested in. We're trying to accelerate and inhibit
senesence in witch hazel leaves, so we've been going over the scientific
literature on the subject quite abit.......
Etherel (2-chloroethyl phosphonic acid) is a chemical that you can apply
to plant tissue to accelerate the production of ethylene (plant hormone)
.....which accelerates senescence and/or fruit ripening.......
Ethephon is another name for the above chemical.....
STS (Silver Thiosulfate) is an ethylene inhibitor...will slow down
fruit-ripening and/or leaf senesence.
Here's some references for you:
STS: University of California-Cooperative Extension; Flower and Nursery
Report for commercial growers; Fall 1981; "Using STS to prevent flower
shattering in potted flowering plant-progress report"
Etherel: Pressman, Huberman, Aloni, and Jaffe. 1983.
"Thigmomorphogenesis: the effect of mechanical perturbation adn ethrel
on stem pithiness in tomato plants" Annals of Botany 52:93-100.
Etherel: Telewski and Mordecai. 1986. "Thigmomorphogenesis: the role
of ethylene in the response of Pinus taeda and Abiew fraseri to
mechanical perturbation" Physiol. Plant. 66:227-233.
General Senescence/Ripening Reviews: Thomas and Stoddart 1980. "Leaf
Senescence" in Annual Review of Plant Physiology 31:83-111.
General: Lieberman 1979. "Biosynthesis and action of ethylene" in
Annual Review of Plant Physiology 30:533-591.
If you have any questions or if this was helpful...you can contact me
via email at txs26 at psuvm.psu.edu or my partner in crime for the summer
jcs27 at psu.edu.
However....we're both only at the above addresses until the end of
August :) Good luck with your project or whatever....
