Fig. 5. Floral characterization of wild type and transgenic Arabidopsis plants.

Each line number represents an independent transgenic line. a The first and second row show the stigma hypertrophy and exsertion commonly observed in FERR-overexpressing plants; the third row shows extreme floral phenotypes observed in two FERR-overexpressing lines. A flower with two bent pistils (left) and one with carpel-like sepals (right, red arrow) were found in line 254, and line 454 (middle) produced a flower with one bent pistil and an unfused carpel. Due to the abnormal floral structures, it is difficult to stage the flowers in the third row from the top. However, by relying on the developmental stage of petals, stamens, and sepals, we classified these flowers as late stages 15–16. b Dissected flowers of wild type (WT) and MSL-overexpressing plants. WT flowers have four long and two short stamens (tetradynamous stamen), whereas the flowers from MSL-overexpressing plants had six long stamens (line 2), extra stamens (lines 51 and 13), or reduplicated Y-shaped stamens (lines 7 and 17).