Michael G. Mason is a plant researcher credited as first author of a 2014 study of sugar supply and apical dominance. The paper lists an affiliation with the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland and credits Mason with research design, experiments, analysis and writing.
The team measured the timing of pea bud growth after removal of the shoot tip, alongside changes in stem auxin and sugar supply. Buds began to grow before the measured local decline in auxin; supplying sucrose also promoted release from inhibition. The result challenged a simple account in which depletion of apically supplied auxin must be the immediate trigger. Its strength is the combination of time-resolved observations and a direct resource manipulation, rather than correlation between branching and sugar abundance alone.[ref]
Sugar demand, not auxin, is the initial regulator of apical dominance by Michael G. Mason and others. 2014, affiliations, author contributions, abstract and sucrose-feeding experiments
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