ABSTRACT
Cucumber plants are annual trailing vines and display a wide variation in sex types. Cucumbers are an important agricultural commodity, grown throughout the world under field, greenhouse, and plastic tunnel conditions. The edible part is an immature fruit in its early stages of development. The cucumbers are plants of special interest for researchers, since their study facilitates extrapolation of mechanisms which may also exist in other plant species. Sex expression in the cucumber is controlled by the interaction of some major genes. The cucumber may be termed a self-inducing flowering plant, though sex expression is influenced by photoperiod. Temperature has been recognized to affect flowering in cucumbers. Cucurbitacins are a group of steroids that occur primarily in Cucurbitaceae.
