Gilor Kelly

INTRODUCTION Plant developmental plasticity enables seedlings to continuously adjust growth and physiology in response to fluctuating environmental and internal cues. In darkness, seedlings elongate in search of light, transitioning from reliance on seed-reserved carbon to autotrophic photosynthetic sugar production.

INTRODUCTION Conventional breeding based on hybridization and selection, or on random identification of bud mutants, has been the predominant methods for developing new elite varieties in fruit trees (Alvarez et al., 2021). Yet, these approaches rely on screening large numbers of trees and inherently have a very low success rate and are therefore lengthy and require expensive resources to cultivate and screen thousands of trees (Alvarez et al., 2021; Song et al., 2019).