Publications by authors named "Frederic Normand"

The negative effects of fruit production during one cycle on reproduction during the following cycle are generally explained by two complementary processes: hormone synthesis and carbohydrate mobilization. Our study focused on mango (Mangifera indica L.) for which it has been shown that reproduction decreases and delays vegetative bud outgrowth.

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Background And Aims: Mango (Mangifera indica L.) is the fifth most widely produced fruit in the world. Its cultivation, mainly in tropical and sub-tropical regions, raises a number of issues such as the irregular fruit production across years, phenological asynchronisms that lead to long periods of pest and disease susceptibility, and the heterogeneity of fruit quality and maturity at harvest.

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Irregular fruit production across successive years is a major issue that limits the profitability of most temperate and tropical fruit crops. It is particularly affected by the reciprocal relationships between vegetative and reproductive growth. The concept of the costs of reproduction is defined in terms of losses in the potential future reproductive success caused by current investment in reproduction.

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Background And Aims: Plant growth, the increase of organ dimensions over time, and development, the change in plant structure, are often studied as two separate processes. However, there is structural and functional evidence that these two processes are strongly related. The aim of this study was to investigate the co-ordination between growth and development using mango trees, which have well-defined developmental stages.

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Plant architecture is commonly defined by the adjacency of organs within the structure and their properties. Few studies consider the effect of endogenous temporal factors, namely phenological factors, on the establishment of plant architecture. This study hypothesized that, in addition to the effect of environmental factors, the observed plant architecture results from both endogenous structural and temporal components, and their interplays.

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Premise Of The Study: Accurate and reliable predictive models are necessary to estimate nondestructively key variables for plant growth studies such as leaf area and leaf, stem, and total biomass. Predictive models are lacking at the current-year branch scale despite the importance of this scale in plant science.

Methods: We calibrated allometric models to estimate leaf area and stem and branch (leaves + stem) mass of current-year branches, i.

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Background And Aims: Growth and reproductive strategies of plants are often related to particular, although usually poorly characterized, spatial distributions of shoots within the plant's architecture. In this study it is therefore hypothesized that a close relationship exists between architectural position, axis morphology (length, diameter, leaf area), and functional behaviour (branching, flowering and fruiting). The study focused on the architectural position of mango growth units, defined here as being the relative position, apical or lateral, on the parent growth unit, i.

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Changes in elastic and plastic components of mango (Mangifera indica L. cv 'Cogshall') fruit growth were analyzed with a model of fruit growth over time and in response to various assimilate supplies. The model is based on water relations (water potential and osmotic and turgor pressures) at the fruit level.

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The key parameters of photosynthetic capacity (maximum carboxylation rate (V(cmax)), electron transport capacity (J(max)) and dark respiration rate (R(d))) and the slope (m) of the stomatal conductance model of Ball et al. [Progress in photosynthetic research, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1987] were measured for a whole growing season in fully expanded leaves of 12-year-old mango trees cv. Cogshall in La Réunion island.

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