Ideas for roses questions to answer through DNA fingerprinting

There are many great ideas in this thread.

If I could do DNA fingerprinting I would like to check if Mme Alfred Carriere is really pollen parent of Fimbriata.

I did use MAC a lot and its fertility is extremely low, so I doubt it.


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If I could do DNA fingerprinting I’d look at ways to set up a DNA database for future rosarians to help avoid the issues of identification we have now.

There is a gentleman doing work on all the different Hume’s Blush variants/candidates, to try and sort out the real Hume’s Bush that might find some DNA work useful too.

The Monsier Tillier/Archiduc Joseph issue would be a good one to solve too, as would the Francis Dubreuil saga.

Answers of 3 questions might be really interesting:

Is R.rugosa possibly one parent of the rose which is around as Geschwinds Orden.

Is Bijou des Prairies genetically the same rose as Geschwinds Orden - comparing them as shrubs growing side by side cannot make us completely sure as the flowers are extremely varying.

And is El Areana true as F2 of R.x harrisonii

Hi David, I’m tossing out a few more from the old rose side for consideration, if these are possible to work out solutions for:

Is the original bourbon rose truly ‘Old Blush’ x ‘Autumn Damask’ or similar, and is ‘Rose Edouard’ of this descent (and likely to be the original bourbon)?

What is the relationship of ‘Duchess of Portland’ to ‘Autumn Damask’? To Rosa gallica?

I would definitely agree with Pierre about the earliest china roses; in particular, I would love to know if they are actually anywhere closely related to the so-called R. chinensis var. spontanea that have been pushed as their wild ancestor of late, but it would pay to look at other related species.

I’m also curious to know where some of the “china” roses with strong yellow tones (‘Mutabilis’, etc.) fall in placement among other china and tea roses, since Rosa chinensis sensu stricto doesn’t really include plants with yellow or orange petals.

Would it be possible to attempt to duplicate the Japanese study indicating the triparental origin of the damask rose (moschata, gallica, and fedtschenkoana)? It would be nice to see that one put to the test.

I have a feeling we could go on like this for a very long time!

Stefan

Like I said earlier any of the classes without parentage would be interesting. So many of these are missed named for one thing. Secondly both genetically and historically it would be interesting to begin to piece together were some of these roses came from and and where they fit in in relation to each other.

Thank you everyone for the great ideas!!! Hopefully we can get the pieces in place to really move forward with this. Come spring when roses are actively growing again I hope those of you with some of these roses that we don’t have access to would be willing to send some new, active growth for DNA extraction.

Sincerely,

David

David, I don’t grow many mentioned in the thread, but you are welcome to anything I grow and I’ll do what I can to provide you with anything at my disposal. My list is on HMF. Treat it as your “oyster”! Kim

Ditto. My list is on HMF under Rosaholics Southern California Garden.

I have quite a few of the roses that have been discussed and can volunteer DNA when you need it, just ask.

Paul

OK, David, the ball is in your court! LOL! Kim

Just had an idea…test Commander Gillette, Basye’s Thornless and Basye’s Legacy to first determine they are all the same, and second, to determine if there is any Rugosa and Moschata in them or if they are all simply Carolina X Hugh Dickson.

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I was also thinking it would be interesting to see what, if any, variation exists between clones of the same variety obtained from different places.

I just thought of one which makes me nuts. Pink Mermaid. PLEASE prove this bloody thing is nothing more than a single, pink Wichurana rambler! It does everything this type of rambler does, include layering itself anywhere it touches soil. It was the third most difficult rose to eradicate from the old garden. The absolute worst was “The Gift”! It’s as much a “gift” as lice or Herpes. Suckers, seedlings, layerings, they were all there and all of them were nearly albino due to chlorosis. The second worst was Francine Austin, which rooted everywhere it touched soil and carried crown gall with it everywhere it rooted. I’ve read theories that Pink Mermaid must be an unknown Lester Hybrid Musk and the ridiculous Bracteata connection. It IS a Wichurana rambler. Make it stop! LOL! Kim

Pink Mermaid = Paris Hilton with a brain and fins, lol.

I’d love to see the china, tea and noisettes highlighted genetically to be able to see the general flow, as well as what the total genetic sources of this era were.

The red chinas as especially confusing because each generation keeps picking up non-china (indica) traits and its like ??? “what the? where’d that come from?”

‘Schneezwerg’ - is Rosa beggeriana the non-Rugosa parent?

If you are interested in another Whit Well’s rose that is questionable, look at Summer Night, which lost its registration because it was said to be Robbie Tucker’s Conundrum. The hybridizer did not agree with this action.

Three more please, David.

‘Betty Bland’ - is Rosa rugosa one of its parents?

‘Mrs. John McNab’ - is Rosa beggeriana one of its parents?

‘Dornroschen’ - does it contain Rosa acicularis?

Thanks

Paul

Could look at ‘James Mason’ to see what percentage of china blood through ‘Scharlachglut’ and it’s grandmother ‘Poinsettia’ it still has.

Might be easier to know what is what about it to make crossing selections easier.

David,

Did this DNA fingerprinting ever happen?

Mark

Hi Mark,

Unfortunately, no… It has been difficult to get very many bands with the ISSR or RAPD markers to be able to effectively do this and there hasn’t been as many interested students as I hoped that want to learn DNA work. I was hoping it would be more streamlined and something we could do more readily with our resources. I used to do AFLP markers and they are much more robust providing many more bands per reaction to compare. Unfortunately we don’t have what it would take to do this system well. In graduate school I used to use radioactively labeled primers and X ray film, but that would be difficult to justify at my teaching institution. We don’t have the system for fluorescently labeled primers and the associated computer system to run them that way… SSR primers are difficult for us to run too because we’d need the polyacrylamide gels versus agarose to probably effectively separate out the minor band size differences. Maybe I can play around with combining multiple ISSR primers or multiple RAPD primers in the same reactions to generate more bands per reaction and eventually get a better system to work. There is company in River Falls that is getting into high throughput DNA analysis with SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). The direction these days seems to be sending away samples for testing with these very robust systems and having a bioinformatics person to help interpret things. Hopefully the price will continue to drop and we can begin to fund such questions. Maybe at some point we can pool together enough resources as grants from rose societies and other groups to run a collection of samples to very effectively answer some of these valuable questions.