User avatar
stella1751
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1494
Joined: Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:40 am
Location: Wyoming

Thoughts on Hybridization

I think I'm starting to get a handle on this process; thank you to everyone who has helped me understand how hybrids are created! I do have two more questions, and I can't find the original thread where we discussed this before. Sorry :cry:

Here's how I think it's done: Like TZ and his tomatoes, you carefully pollinate one parent plant with the other's pollen. That way you know exactly which two plants made a contribution to the F1 seed. If you like this first generation, you select only the uniform produce, the ones that match your requirements, and chuck the rest. That I got from Eric's .pdf file. The remaining produce are used for seed.

To ensure uniform seed production in the future for this F1 generation, you would need to propagate the parents from cuttings, right? They won't live forever, and you couldn't take a chance that the next cross would be identical to the first, given two different parents of the same variety. Correct? (That's my first question.)

Second question: Can the parents also be hybrids, or must they be pure-in-the-strain heirlooms?

Third question: If a company breeds a hybrid, selling that hybrid under its own brand, the only way another company could sell that hybrid under the same name would be to get its hands on cuttings from the original hybrid's parents, right? Or wrong? I wonder whether companies sell other companies plants produced from the original parents.

In another thread, someone mentioned the trend toward large jalapenos, suggesting that they were all the same pepper but just produced under different names. Could that mean corporate espionage, that the companies determined the cross used to make the huge jalapeno and experimented with its own original parents? It's interesting that they all have different names. Or does it mean they simply bought the first one's seeds and reproduced from chancy hybrids? Could they have gotten their hands on the original pepper plants?

I'm almost there in understanding this process. Thanks for bearing with me!

DoubleDogFarm
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 6113
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2010 11:43 pm

Stella,

I will let someone else answer your questions. This topic makes my head hurt. :lol:

I just wanted to say, Why? Is it just for the knowledge? Knolwledge is a good thing. I just what to grow fresh, nutritious tomatoes. :wink:

A packet of Celebrity tomato seeds cost about $3.50. Here at our Farmers Market tomatoes sell for $4.00 lb. Not sure the average weight yield per plant, but lets call it 10lbs. So this is $40.00 per seed. If hundred plants per packet, that's $4000.00 gross. If you don't sell at the market, your value is based on cost per pound at your grocery store.

I have a friend, she is really into seed saving. She only buys open pollinated seed. If she doesn't take the precautions to prevent cross pollination, whats the point. She harvested a orange looking zucchini in 2009 and saved the seed from it. The seed, she calls Carotene squash. She started plants from these seeds and gave me one. This plant today has five huge looking fruits on it. Something between pumpkin and zucchini. Will see if they turn orange. Photo later if interested.


I guess my point in this blah, blah, blah is, breeding is a lot of work. Cross pollination prevention is a lot of work. Seed to return, makes seed inexpensive. I'm willing to pay for the hard work of seed development, in order to have guaranteed quality, quanity, taste and deases resistance.


Back to the preprogrammed post

Eric

csvd87
Senior Member
Posts: 282
Joined: Sun Jun 20, 2010 9:12 pm
Location: Vancouver Island, Canada

well I bought seeds for Black Pearl ornamental peppers, so far.. the leaves are WAY bigger than that of the black pearl, but it is the right colour.. a little more green. who knows what I'll get in the way of fruit, they could be 25 inches long and bright pink.... not likely, but hey I am trying to do a little bit of breeding, can't hurt to try, and see what I get next year :) crossed my Filius Blue with my Banana, maybe purple banana peppers on a variegated plant :?

User avatar
soil
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1855
Joined: Thu Jan 22, 2009 8:40 pm
Location: N. California

I'm not much of a breeder or anything, but I have been growing and selecting my own tomato seeds for a few years now and love it. not bringing in any outside genetics. the first year I started with about 10 select variety's that I truly liked. they were all grown together and cross pollinated by bees, the wind, etc.... just not me. I selected the best fruits( taste, yield, type of tomato) from the plants that had traits I wanted( drought tolerance, pest resistance, disease resistance) the next year there was quite the variation( which was fun!), yet again I selected the plants and fruits with the qualities I liked best. now down the line 4 years of the same process I only have 5 select different tomatoes that come up from seed that I have been selecting for over the years. not only do they taste amazing and are exactly what I want. the resistance to the environment and outside pressures is amazing. everyone who grows my tomato starts says they put all the others to shame in taste, yield, and resistance. I think the main trick with breeding work is to not give up early. the first year after the initial cross would have made most people quit because a few of the plants well...sucked( but who hasn't paid for a tomato they thought was not worth growing again) but a few of those plants were BETTER than the parents they came from. now I only get plants that I like and perform well consistently. not sure if I answered any of your questions in my ramblings or not. :lol:

User avatar
stella1751
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1494
Joined: Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:40 am
Location: Wyoming

DoubleDogFarm wrote:Stella,

I will let someone else answer your questions. This topic makes my head hurt. :lol:

I just wanted to say, Why? Is it just for the knowledge? Knolwledge is a good thing. I just what to grow fresh, nutritious tomatoes. :wink:

A packet of Celebrity tomato seeds cost about $3.50. Here at our Farmers Market tomatoes sell for $4.00 lb. Not sure the average weight yield per plant, but lets call it 10lbs. So this is $40.00 per seed. If hundred plants per packet, that's $4000.00 gross. If you don't sell at the market, your value is based on cost per pound at your grocery store.

I have a friend, she is really into seed saving. She only buys open pollinated seed. If she doesn't take the precautions to prevent cross pollination, whats the point. She harvested a orange looking zucchini in 2009 and saved the seed from it. The seed, she calls Carotene squash. She started plants from these seeds and gave me one. This plant today has five huge looking fruits on it. Something between pumpkin and zucchini. Will see if they turn orange. Photo later if interested.


I guess my point in this blah, blah, blah is, breeding is a lot of work. Cross pollination prevention is a lot of work. Seed to return, makes seed inexpensive. I'm willing to pay for the hard work of seed development, in order to have guaranteed quality, quanity, taste and deases resistance.


Back to the preprogrammed post

Eric
Eric, for knowledge and also for fun. I want to play with this next year, maybe even the year after. Hybridization has really begun to interest me. This might be my new hobby, following on the heels of my seed saving hobby.

I give away most of what I grow. I like watching things grow. I like the challenge of gardening more than the gardening itself. The harvest itself leaves me cold. The best time of the year for me is setting out the plants and nurturing them to maturity.

What a rush!

TZ -OH6
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 2097
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 7:27 pm
Location: Mid Ohio

You are complicating things a little.

"Hybrid" has alot of meanings in everyday language, but for annual vegetables/crops it is the first generation from true breeding parents.
So the two parents are kept pure by letting them reproduce with their own kind.

The populations of true breeding varieties have practically no genetic diversity, all plants are genetically the same, so when you cross two different varieties, their "hybrid" will always have the same genetic combination.

If you cross a Minnesota Midget mellon with a Hearts of Gold mellon you will get the same "Hybrid" that I do.

Example: Big Boy tomatoes (a hybrid). One parent is Teddy Jones, and the other parent is an industrial secret "Variety X". Both are grown in their own separate fields to keep their seed lines going through open pollination (60-some generations since the 1940s). On other farms (in far away countries with cheap labor) they are both grown, and pollen is taken from Teddy Jones and placed on Variety X flowers. All seeds from those Variety X plants are Big Boy hybrid, and all Big Boy hybrid plants are the same.

I have a pretty good paste tomato hybrid this year from crossing Kosovo with Green Sausage last year. It is a little bit bigger than a Roma, pointed plum shape, red with faint yellow stripes, dry sweet flesh with tangy seed gel. If anybody else crosses Kosovo with Green Sausage they will get the exact same thing in the first generation.

That is what is going on with hybrid seed...End...Stop





To understand plant breeding and the stabilization process these sites will help

https://kdcomm.net/~tomato/gene/genes.html
https://kdcomm.net/~tomato/gene/genes2.html


Plant breeding is another thing because you are looking for something good in a population of random genetic combinations. Those combinations can come out of the hybrid of two stable parents or from unstable parents (F1 hybrids or other) chosen because they carry desirable traits. What you call the offspring doesn't matter. You might be tempted to call this a set of plants "hybrid of hybrids" but that just makes things confusing so what breeders usually do for record keeping is code things to indicate what the parents were, what line is being selected and what generation is being grown. Depending on the type of plant, when you find a superior offspring you can either propogate it asexually (fruit tree and grape vine grafting, potato tubers, asparagras root crowns etc), or continue to select from seeds for several more generations untill you weed out genetic variation and get stable true breeding seed. It takes tomatoes about seven generations of selection to weed out genetic variation.


It is impractical to stabilize long generation plants such as fruit trees into true breeding "open pollinated" varieties for seed, so when a superior offspring shows up from genetically mixed seed population it is propagated by cuttings/grafting. Potatoes have twice the genetic count of most plants so it is impractical/impossible to stabilize them into true breeding varieties so they are propogated asexually.

TZ -OH6
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 2097
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 7:27 pm
Location: Mid Ohio

Let me see if I can sum up the answers to the questons.

The parents need to be pure strain or the F1 offspring will show variation. The parents reproduce themselves from seed. The parents of hybrids are industrial secrets, and industrial spies would most likely steal seeds of the parents, not cuttings.


Optional ways to do it.

Hybrid orchids are cloned by the thousands by tissue culture so it is becomming common to see notification of plant patent on their tags. This is a different use of the word "Hybrid" than for vegetables. Venus Flytraps are also tissue cultured, but that is because they don't produce alot of seeds.

User avatar
stella1751
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1494
Joined: Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:40 am
Location: Wyoming

Excellent replies, everyone; thanks! Now you've all given me something to think about for a while. I especially like the idea of "variety X." Don't ask me why; I just do :lol:

garden5
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 3062
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:40 pm
Location: ohio

Well, here I come to piggy-back onto this thread.

My question is: does it make a difference which parent is the mother/father plant as to what the F1 generation is like?

That is, if pollen was takes from plant-1 and put on the flower of plant-2, that flower would grow and produce a fruit, the seeds of which would produce hybrid-X.

Now, say pollen was taken from plant-2 and put onto plant-1, this would cause a fruit to form which would contain seed that wold produce an F1 generation hybrid. Would this one be another hybrid-X, or would it be different?

Thanks for the great insights, TZ!

User avatar
stella1751
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1494
Joined: Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:40 am
Location: Wyoming

Good question, Garden5! I wish I had thought to ask it :lol: I know that when you put a donkey to a mare, you get a mule, but when you put a stallion to a donkey, you get a henny. The mule looks considerably different from the henny, and there's a greatly diminished chance of fertilization occurring on the latter cross. Yeah, the genetics are way different, especially given the disparity in number of chromosomes between the two species, but it's still an interesting question to ask!

TZ -OH6
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 2097
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 7:27 pm
Location: Mid Ohio

Does it make a difference which is used as the pollen parent? Possibly.

Some genes are extra nuclear and maternally inherited (those held in the mitochondria and plastids (chloroplasts)), so in tomatoes there might be some sort of flavor difference for blacks and green when ripes (which retain chlorphyll after ripening), and possibly color difference for yellows since white tomatoes and orange tomatoes are both different forms of a "yellow" gene. If you were playing with variegated foliage (fish pepper etc) it might matter then as well.

Can you tell before doing the cross? Not that I know of, but if I were forced to go in one direction I would use the plant with the vegetative characteristics I wanted as the mother/flower parent. It is best to do both ways and see what you get.

In the above example I just picked a direction for the Teddy Jones x variety X cross to be simple about it.

Potatoes are another story. Many many varieties have low quality pollen and are partially to fully male sterile, and I think that there are some that have good pollen but tend to drop flowers, making them female sterile in a way. AFAIK this is not normal for most crop plants.

Some types of fruit trees are self incompatible, and since they are propogated by cutting/grafting you need two different varieties in the same orchard to get good fruit set on either, but that is a bit off topic.

garden5
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 3062
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:40 pm
Location: ohio

So then, it may or may not matter as to which parent the pollen comes from.

I like your suggestion on just trying it both ways and seeing what happens. That would make for a good experiment, perform two different crosses with 2 varieties and see if there's a difference in the F1 hybrids.

User avatar
jal_ut
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 7447
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

I'm willing to pay for the hard work of seed development, in order to have guaranteed quality, quanity, taste and deases resistance.
I agree. The exception is open pollinated varieties that are easy to save seed from.

About hybrids: The F1 or first generation of a hybrid from two stable parents are all the same. They may exhibit characteristics that make them more vigorous and better producers.

If you save seed from this generation, the F2 generation may have some individuals like each parent and some like the F1 generation and other differences too. In other words every plant may be different. On the level of a backyard garden, it hardly seems practical to experiment past the F1 generation.

If it really turns you on though, I recommend you do some serious reading about the process and techniques used to control the cross breeding. A college level botany course would be good.

I grow a few hybrid plants and really like them, but I won't save seed from them. Also I won't save seed from squash because it so freely crosses with the other varieties of squash.

FWIW

User avatar
stella1751
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1494
Joined: Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:40 am
Location: Wyoming

jal_ut wrote:
I'm willing to pay for the hard work of seed development, in order to have guaranteed quality, quanity, taste and deases resistance.
I agree. The exception is open pollinated varieties that are easy to save seed from.

About hybrids: The F1 or first generation of a hybrid from two stable parents are all the same. They may exhibit characteristics that make them more vigorous and better producers.

If you save seed from this generation, the F2 generation may have some individuals like each parent and some like the F1 generation and other differences too. In other words every plant may be different. On the level of a backyard garden, it hardly seems practical to experiment past the F1 generation.

If it really turns you on though, I recommend you do some serious reading about the process and techniques used to control the cross breeding. A college level botany course would be good.

I grow a few hybrid plants and really like them, but I won't save seed from them. Also I won't save seed from squash because it so freely crosses with the other varieties of squash.

FWIW
I don't agree that a college-level botany course would be necessary. That would be like advising someone interested in fishing to take a college course in angling or someone interested in watching football games to serve as a waterboy to the Denver Broncos. A hobby is an avocation, not a vocation, a source of pleasure, not of income.

I do think that the more we know about our plants, the more pleasure we will derive from gardening. Knowledge and fun are not mutually exclusive terms, although as a teacher I do recognize that there are people out there who resist learning 8) I, however, happen to like learning new things. Sometimes those new things are practicable; sometimes they're not. Whether or not the learned concept is of practical use is of no concern; it's the learning itself that pleases me most.

As mentioned, I give most of my produce away. I didn't eat one squash out of the possibly hundreds I grew last year, but many Casper residents, people who had probably never eaten organic produce before, many of them underprivileged children, sat down to a meal for which I provided at least one of the key ingredients. This year, it's cucumbers. Lord have mercy, it's cucumbers, by the bucketful.

The people my produce feeds are unlikely to possess appetites sensitive to subtle variations in flavor, texture, size, or color. I know that's harsh to say, but it's true. They just want food: nutritious, palatable food. I really don't think it's selfish of me to want to have some fun while I am feeding them.

Gardening is not a hair shirt, something I must do to atone for past mistakes or whatever. It's a rollicking good time. People don't need to be an expert fisherman or a superior armchair quarterback to enjoy their hobbies. They need only to enjoy them, to recognize that there will be mistakes made and to laugh and possibly learn from their mistakes.

I like that other people benefit from my hobby, especially the children, but that is secondary, the end to my hobby. It's the means that give me the greatest pleasure :D

User avatar
jal_ut
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 7447
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

I will let someone else answer your questions. This topic makes my head hurt.
Yep!
I don't agree that a college-level botany course would be necessary.
I am not suggesting it is necessary. I said it would be good. Here is why: I took college botany, two courses and also taxonomy, many years ago. The subject of genetic manipulations and plant breeding were complex and in depth even then. Since then knowlege in that field has grown exponentionally. There is more to learn than we may have time to learn it.

The second reason I suggest college is that we can find all kind of reading on the internet these days, and who is to say what is the truth? For sure anything you read in forums is suspect! I can give you my opinion, and I can write it down and put it on the internet, but that doesn't make it right nor truth.

Look to the good places, like our universities, for info and I think you will do fine.

I am going to go take an aspirin.

DoubleDogFarm
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 6113
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2010 11:43 pm

Funny Jim, Take two, one for me :lol:

Learning, keeping the mind active is all good. My oldest brother is in late stages of Alzheimer's disease. He is only 56.

Somethings, to me, are over thought, complicated. My motto, Keep It simple stupid.


Eric



Return to “Vegetable Gardening Forum”