In vitro flowering – A system for tracking floral organ development in Dendrocalamus hamiltonii Nees et Arn. ex Munro.

Dendrocalamus hamiltonii plants are slender and tall (15-25 m) thereby, rendering tagging, sampling and tracking the development of flowers difficult. Therefore, a reproducible system of in vitro flowering was established for tracking the stages of flower development. MS medium supplemented with 2.22 µM 6-benzylaminopurine, 1.23 µM indole-3-butyric acid and 2% sucrose was optimized as the flower induction medium (FIM) wherein 28 and 42 days were required for the development of gynoecium and androecium, respectively. Six distinct stages of in vitro flower development were identified, and the flowers were comparable with that of in planta sporadic flowers. Pollen viability of the in vitro flowers was higher than those of in planta ones. The in vitro system developed in the present study facilitates easy tracking of different stages of flower development under controlled environmental conditions. It can also be used for medium- or long-term storage of pollens and manipulation of in vitro fertilization.

A rare spectrum of lesions encountered in fibroid uterus: histopathological report.

Symplasmic or atypical leiomyoma and lipoleiomyoma are two very rare morphological variants of leiomyoma of the uterus. Both the tumours show a benign behavior like the classical leiomyoma. But differentiated from the classical leiomyoma by presence of bizarre cellular pattern with paucity of mitosis and presence of mature lipocytes within a leiomyoma respectively. We report one case each of these variants in two routine fibroid uterus specimens of two different patients, as they can be misdiagnosed as leiomyosarcoma and well-differentiated liposarcoma respectively, by inexperienced pathologists.