Summary: The overall research program is to understand the processes that control fruit size development in apple, and the molecular basis for its regulation. In this research we propose to: 1. Measure both the rate and duration of cell division in 5 apple cultivars differing in their fruit size potential to determine the contributions of receptacle size at flowering, rate of cell division, duration of cell division and cell expansion to final fruit size. 2. Identify and clone those genes associated with cell division from apple and relate the expression of these genes to the observed patterns of cell division.
