Studies of Fruit Development in Relation to Plant Hormones: II. The Effect of Naphthalene Acetic Acid on Fruit Set and Fruit Development in Apples

The experiments described in this paper were designed. (1) to investigate the mechanism whereby α-naphthalene acetic acid (NAA), applied as a spray to apple trees between full bloom and two to four weeks after petal-fall, reduces the crop ; and (2) to assess the possible value of this substance as a blossom- and fruit-thinning agent.

Spraying open flowers with NAA before pollination was found to induce incompatibility between the pollen tubes and the stylar tissue, and it is considered that this may account for the reduction in set which results from spraying trees at full bloom with NAA. Applied after petal- fall, the spray caused the abortion of a large proportion of the developing seeds and this, in turn, led to an abnormally large drop of young fruitlets. The seeds appeared to be susceptible to damage by NAA only as long as the endosperm was in the free nuclear stage, a condition which, in most varieties of apple, persists until about the third week after petal-fall. As a thinning agent, NAA has the disadvantage that it tends to retard fruit growth. This effect is particularly marked when the spray is applied later than two weeks after petal-fall, and frequently offsets any increase in fruit size which might have resulted from thinning. Earlier application of the spray may, in certain varieties, cause a permanent stunting of the foliage. In the strongly biennial Miller’s Seedling, none of the thinning treatments, using NAA on individual branches, resulted in the differentiation of fruit buds in the " on ” year.