Can a rose flower which has been cut at the peduncle be artificially kept to produce a seed bearing hip?
In case you are wondering…I have run out of coffee this morning, which may explain this bizarre question…off to shops right away LOL!!
I would doubt it, George. Can you figure out a way to maintain a cut peduncle three to four months with all it needs to successfully set and ripen seed? Kim
tell me!
Thanks for not laughing too hard at me here, they are pretty way out questions I know… but they have crossed my mind.
I have also wondered if the peduncle or even other floral tissue parts can be tissue cultured to produce viable clones of the original plant??
It would be real cool if scientists in high tech labs could /can even multiply rose clones asexually or sexually using just these floral parts.
For example, in the case of asexual reproduction of some type of sported flower mutation, such ability might come in handy in cases where say there was a chimera/sported flower where the chimera ocurred too close to the flower itself and did not occur on the highest bud, thus preventing the sport from being successfully propagated by budding.
“It would be real cool if scientists in high tech labs could /can even multiply rose clones asexually or sexually using just these floral parts.”
Tissue culture labs were established to facilitate the propagation of genera that were too difficult to propagate by traditional methods. Roses just aren’t difficult to propagate. So, there is little, if any, incentive by TC labs to take on roses; they are cheap and easy to do from cuttings and budding, and TC offers no additional benefits, it only makes it more expensive.
George, I am sort of “thread jacking” a bit here for a minute.
Paul, as you say ‘tissue culture’ labs do not take on roses " So, there is little, if any, incentive ". So in your thoughts, what about the “clean” enviroment they have could they not do your rugosa “26-09-04” from your blog and send it to Australia now instead of us having to wait upto seven years from the USA/England for roses because of Quarrantine laws. A student doing a PhD, suggested there “could” be a link between “Southern Oak Death” and roses. Is this not a good enough incentive to “try” this method, Regards David.
I suspect there are different regulations regarding import/export of tissue cultured plants, depending on the plant material and the countries involved. In other words, I would expect not all countries would admit TC plants without observing quarantine rules as applicable for plants of the same genus produced by standard methods. You’d have to contact your local Ag to find out how that would be handled.
As for getting it from the US to AU faster, you did take into account the time required to isolate clean meristem and then culture the required volume of undifferentiated tissue. And then there is the time required to persuade the undifferentiated masses to differentiate into recognizable plants, get them to root in vitro, and then move them into a soil environment to get them established. Add another year or two to build the plants into something regarded as “market ready” and you may be looking at several years of work. I don’t really see much incentive in terms of getting the cultivar to market faster. Not much, anyway.
George, this is an interesting question in theory. As I recall, back before 1980 or so, there were efforts made to do tissue culture of roses, by a group a U of Wisconsin. I cannot recall the name at the moment, other than McGowan?. And there were even in vitro propagated roses sold in this country. The notion was that you could make hundreds of plantlets from a single apical bud, then build them up within a year or so to a salable stage. I bought one, but was not impressed that it was any better than one gotten from cuttings. I tried some myself, about the time I was looking at ethylene effects.
The big challenge is getting sterile starting material without destroying it. The apical meristem is pretty well protected and will grow out. But a piece of peduncle which is fully differentiated would have to undergo dedifferentiation to make some sort of callus tissue and then be regenerated, as Paul mentions. It is a long slog to determine proper conditions, which vary for every species, and often for different cultivars within a species. I think that even to grow in vitro plantlets proved challenging for most common CVs which is why the method never took off.
Waay back when, my best friend and I each bought Armstrong Roselings, the tissue culture produced roses in their cute little four inch deep pots at a now defunct garden center. If I recall correctly, they cost between $15 and $20 each, which was an outrageous price for any rose nearly 30 years ago. I bought Mr. Lincoln and grew that plant until about 2006. He bought his mother Prima Dona and Double Delight.
Mr. Lincoln developed into a gorgeous plant. The other two died sometime in the ensuing years. I thought it a very interesting method of propagation as well as a potentially useful way to eliminate virus infection. I can’t speak for the two my friend gave his mother, but my Lincoln never exhibited any symptoms in all the years I had it. Kim
Katherine Kamo at the USDA published the most advanced work on somatic embryogenesis of roses. The USDA decided to stop her work on roses so there has been nothing else from her on roses in ten years.
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Castillon, J. and Kamo, K. Maturation and conversion of somatic embryos of three genetically diverse rose cultivars. HortScience 37:973-977.
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Kamo, K., Jones, B., Castillon, J., Bolar, J. and Smith, F. Dispersal and filtration of embryogenic callus increases the frequency of embryo maturation and conversion for hybrid tea roses. Plant Cell Rep. 22:787-792.
IMHO the most potentially useful application of embryo culture for roses would be somatic cell fusion - the creation of hybrids between cultivars that are recalcitrant to cross pollination. You could even try crossing generic boundaries, say strawberry, blackberry or potentilla with roses.
Frankenberry juice, anyone?
Tissue culture has other problems with some varieties of plants. Back when I was more active in the landscape industry, we dealt with many plants that were ‘cloned’. Some of the problems with phormium, agapanthus, and bougainvillea, were that they did not always clone to type. Some, esp. colors with lots of dark pigment, did not clone as dark as the stock plants. Of course stripes were very iffy, and sometimes the cloned stock was slower to show basal branching, or might be more ‘diminuitive’ overall. At that time the policy of the large producer I was working for was to sell these anomalies under the same label. Some of these problems have been resolved, but far from all.
This link is fairly easily understood, and explains some of those problems.
TITLE: “Oxidative stress and physiological, epigenetic and genetic variability in plant tissue culture: implications for micropropagators and genetic engineers”
Alan C. Cassells and Rosario F. Curry
It has been done with lilies. To make some crosses between species that aren’t normally compatible, they do sometimes pollinate completely in vitro, so would be theoretically possible for other plants.