ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on aspects that affect the final yield and quality of the harvested sugar beet rather than a description of mechanisms such as phloem loading and membrane transport which are shared with other plants. The accumulation of large quantities of a-amino nitrogen compounds greatly decreases the processing quality of the harvested beet. Sugar beet crops exhibit relatively consistent seasonal trends of dry matter production and distribution. Factors that restrict cell expansion and increase ring density shorten the length of the diffusion pathway, steepen the concentration gradient and thus increase sucrose uptake into the cells and the final tissue sucrose concentration. The physiological role and interrelations of the accumulations of the different solutes in storage roots are of interest because of the detrimental effects that nonsucrose components have on the efficiency of sugar extraction during processing. The composition of the storage root is not static but changes during growth.
