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njbiology

is growing a population of plants from a single motherplant good

njbiology
18 years ago

If i were to buy a single flowering, hardy pond plant, such as a monkey flower or even a garen perenial like sage, and plant it.

1. Would the plants own flowers have a good chance of polinating themselves with eachother?

2. More importantly, would i be able to form a healthy population, several generations, from a single flowering plants - or is the fact that all of the resulting generations comming from a single plant would be weaker in some ways then if i were to have a group of plants fertilizing eachother and introducing diversity to the gene pool?

Comments (4)

  • david_zlesak
    18 years ago

    Great question. Fertility and if you obtain seeds depends on if the species is self incompatible or self compatible. For instance with heliopsis, if you just have one isolated plant you typically get no seed set, but after you have a couple or more then you get lots of seeds and seedlings coming up. I would research the plant family and species to learn what is common.

    For the idea of starting a population from limited founding parents, that depends on the species to what degree it suffers from inbreeding depression, if at all. As a breeder looking for diversity, I like to obtain multiple cultivars with different traits to begin with to generate diversity and then select what I am looking for. I guess it depends on your objective, but I would lean towards not bottlenecking your population too much if it can be avoided and having at least a few founding parents.

    Sincerely,
    David

  • paalexan
    18 years ago

    How susceptible a plant is to inbreeding depression is often inversely correlated with how reliably that plant will self-pollinate. Inbreeding is generally bad, and some plants won't self-fertilize, but it all depends on which species you're working with. For instance, some plants exhibit no noticable inbreeding depression...

    Patrick Alexander

  • njbiology
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Hi,

    Would you say it would be better for me to populate my yard with seedlings from a single mother plant (i.e. Phlox divaricata, Spigelia marilandica, Iris cristata), or to get plants of these species from different geographic regions (ecotypes). The first may cause inbreeding depression, whereas the later may cause outbreeding depression and ecotype hybrid vigor, followed by decline (F2, etc.)

    Steve

  • parker25mv
    8 years ago
    last modified: 8 years ago

    Yes, in general for sexual propagation it is often better for the plants not to be too closely related from the same line, but not to be too genetically dissimilar either. This is clearly evident if we look at fruit trees, they have evolved to avoid either extreme of inbreeding or outbreeding.

    Most sweet cherry varieties are considered self-infertile, they are incapable of pollinating themselves. 2 Bing cherries planted side by side will not be able to pollinate each other and no fruit will form. This is nature's way of avoiding inbreeding.

    Royal Ann cherries come from the same breeding line as Bing, and happen to be too genetically similar to be capable of pollinating each other. However, Montmorency can pollinate Bing. But Montmorency, being in the sour cherry family, it has 32 chromosomes, whereas sweet cherries (like Bing) have 16 chromosomes. In this case, the resulting crossbreed can produce fruit but will have sterile seeds, it cannot be further sexually propagated.

    In other cases two different cherry varieties may be reproductively isolated from each other due to different blossoming times. Cherry trees tend to blossom within a short timespan of only 2 weeks, and are precisely timed. So members of two different cherry species (or sometimes different varieties within the same species) growing in close proximity may avoid interbreeding, even though cross pollination is theoretically possible and would produce fertile offspring.

    Apricot trees cannot pollinate cherries either, they are not members of the same species, despite both species being related. You can easily graft a cherry tree onto apricot rootstock, since they are both stone fruits, however.

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