Malus x domestica (apple tree)

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cellular organisms - Eukaryota - Viridiplantae - Streptophyta - Streptophytina - Embryophyta - Tracheophyta - Euphyllophyta - Spermatophyta - Magnoliophyta - eudicotyledons - core eudicotyledons - rosids - eurosids I - Rosales - Rosaceae - Maloideae - Malus - Malus x domestica

Brief facts

• The apple is a small deciduous tree reaching 5-12 m tall, with a broad, often densely twiggy crown.
• The apple tree is one of the most widely cultivated tree fruits, and, probably, the earliest tree to be cultivated.
• The ancestor of the modern domesticated appletree, Malus sieversii, is native to the mountainous areas of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang, China.

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Developmental stages (life cycle)

Life Cycle Stages

• seed stage MeSH usually apple cultivars used as a rootstock are grown from seeds
• seedling MeSH usually seedling is used as a rootstock for grafting scion of desired cultivar on it after it is about 1 year old; also, most of new cultivars originate as seedlings, which either arise by chance or are bred by deliberately crossing cultivars with promising characteristics
• sapling 2-4 years old tree wich consists of a rootstock and a graft of desirable cultivar
• mature 5-10 years old tree; mature tree can bear 40-200 kg of apples per year
  • flowering apples must be cross-pollinated to develop fruit
    • early flowering the center of the flower cluster, King Bloom, has opened
    • full bloom 80% or more of the flowers on the tree or in the orchard are open
    • petal fall flower petals are falling from the tree
  • ripening
    • fruit set 8-15 mm fruits; during this period farmers thin the fruits; also, natural dropping of inferior fruits occurs
    • green fruit 1-2.5 inches fruits (for Red Delicious cultivar); green or mostly green in color; by this time final fruit count has been determinged (no more fruit thinning and fruit dropping)
    • ripe harvestable fruit; final fruit size is a result of the number of fruit on the tree and the growing conditions that year

Apple fruit anatomy

References

• Major topic "Malus": free full text articles in PubMed

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Appendix: apple fruit development

Janssen BJ, Thodey K, Schaffer RJ, Alba R, Balakrishnan L, Bishop R, Bowen JH, Crowhurst RN, Gleave AP, Ledger S, McArtney S, Pichler FB, Snowden KC, Ward S. Global gene expression analysis of apple fruit development from the floral bud to ripe fruit. BMC Plant Biol. 2008 Feb 17;8:16. PMID: 18279528

Apple fruit development. Apple fruit at various stages of development. A, 0 DAA, B, 14 DAA, C, 35 DAA, D, 60 DAA, E, 87 DAA, F, 132 DAA, G, 146 DAA. H, diagram of fruit development showing the timing of major physiological events and the sampling time points, adapted from [17–19]. Ripening is shown as a solid and dashed red, solid from the time of the climacteric and dashed for events prior to the climacteric. Bar = 1 cm.

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