See:
Hi Henry, this is pretty good.
Thank you very much!
It is a very interesting thing for me to read about the doublings they did with persica!
I myself tried this in 2005 and 2006 and I have a few still living plants (treated with colchicine as seedlings), where I still don’t know if they are at least partly polyploid.
(I took about 20 seedlings in these two years, in 1% colchicine over 2 days in petridishes at room temperature.)
One problem could occur then with their tetraploid persicas - they can be very infertile (dosis effects?) … its the reason, why tetraploid plants mostly are derived from hybrids, not from species.
But - why did they also try this … perhaps the answer on thta question should be very interesting.
Greetings,
Arno
Arno,
I think that the authors would have to answer your quesion, but perhaps it was to use these new tetraploids in crosses with modern roses. That wasy they could bepass the triploid intermediate stage that except for ‘Tigris’ have all apparently been infertile, and start working on repeat blooming right away.
Another advantage would be to gain more of the persica genes since already many of them are missing from ‘Tigris’ the only real link that we have to work with.
BTW, I am still making crosses back to ‘Tigris’ to recover more of that gene pool. I think that the more “lines” coming direct from ‘Tigris’ the better. These can then be crossed with one another further on down the line. Today I made a few crosses with my K201 (repeat blooming, probably tetraploid hulthemia hybrid) pollen onto ‘Tigris’.
Jim Sproul
Hi Jim!
Good Luck to that crossings, here still temperatures below 0