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Crossbreeding Plants?
Hello,
I'm a complete lay-person, so please forgive me if the answer to my question is obvious. If I have two very different species of plants and they are both diploids with the same number of chromosomes, will I be able to crossbreed them, or are there other determining factors? Thanks |
#2
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In article , none writes
Hello, I'm a complete lay-person, so please forgive me if the answer to my question is obvious. If I have two very different species of plants and they are both diploids with the same number of chromosomes, will I be able to crossbreed them, or are there other determining factors? Thanks No. To deviate slightly, you can often cross related diploids and tetraploids - the offspring, which are triploids, are sterile (or apomictic), but are otherwise viable. Also, what matters is not so much the number of chromosomes, but the number of chromosome arms. (There's several cases of species with varying numbers of chromosomes, tho' I don't recall such a plant species.) There's lots of other determining factors, which run from ecological isolation to hybrid inviability. By manually crossing plants to bypass some of the earlier ones, but I'd expect that most wide crosses would fail due to the pollen grains of the pollen parent failing to grow in the styles of the seed parent. If you get past that then perhaps the sperm can't penetrate the egg. And if it does perhaps the resulting embryo doesn't produce the right signals to cause seed maturation. And so on. -- Stewart Robert Hinsley |
#3
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As you say, there are many barriers to interfertility. Plants having the
same chromosome number is no guarantee that they will be interfertile. Sometimes wide, even intergeneric, crosses are possible with a third species are possible when two presumed closely related species will not hybridize. Sometimes the diploids are not interfertile while the polyploids are. Sometimes a cross one way will be fertile when the reciprocal cross repeatedly fails. There are no guarantees. All you can to is try reciprocal crosses and see what happens. There was one cross that I had tried 20 times before I was able to get fertile seed. "Stewart Robert Hinsley" wrote in message ... In article , none writes Hello, I'm a complete lay-person, so please forgive me if the answer to my question is obvious. If I have two very different species of plants and they are both diploids with the same number of chromosomes, will I be able to crossbreed them, or are there other determining factors? Thanks No. To deviate slightly, you can often cross related diploids and tetraploids - the offspring, which are triploids, are sterile (or apomictic), but are otherwise viable. Also, what matters is not so much the number of chromosomes, but the number of chromosome arms. (There's several cases of species with varying numbers of chromosomes, tho' I don't recall such a plant species.) There's lots of other determining factors, which run from ecological isolation to hybrid inviability. By manually crossing plants to bypass some of the earlier ones, but I'd expect that most wide crosses would fail due to the pollen grains of the pollen parent failing to grow in the styles of the seed parent. If you get past that then perhaps the sperm can't penetrate the egg. And if it does perhaps the resulting embryo doesn't produce the right signals to cause seed maturation. And so on. -- Stewart Robert Hinsley |
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