Vegetative Growth and Reproductive Development of Tomato (Solanum lycopersicon L.) as Affected by Synthetic Female Sex Hormones

Varying concentrations of birth control pill solutions containing synthetic female hormones were applied to tomato plants to ascertain their effects on vegetative and reproductive development as well as post-harvest fruit characteristics of the tomato plant. ANOVA revealed no significant differences in the responses of the tomato plants across treatments for the tested data parameters. It was noted however that T{1} (155ppb) produced fruits which had ascorbic acid content significantly higher than that in the control setup, raising the possibility that this concentration can be used to boost Vitamin C levels in tomato fruits. Principal component analysis (PCA) resulted in the extraction of three principal components, only two of which had significant contributions to total variance. Finally, these two statistical tools proved their effectiveness in revealing variable responses of the tomato plants across treatments as well as in elucidating the contributions of evaluated parameters to total variance in this specific data set.