Post by Bob Johnson on Jul 19, 2022 1:53:11 GMT
Back in the 1970's there was a lot of interest in creating tetraploid lacti varieties. Were any actually produced ? At the time it was felt that perhaps some had been, but it may have been wishful thinking.
But here's a quite recent paper on this same issue. These folks seem to have been successful in producing viable tetraploid pollen grains in lactis by injecting the developing flower buds with a colchicine solution. From what I can gather, when using the best of their pollen on another lacti, they were able to produce…two tetraploid seedlings out of the 116 seedlings they got. (Their pollens still had a lot of diploid grains in them.)
They said the number was so few because the lacti was a diploid.
One does wonder how things would have turned out if they had used this pollen on tetraploid herbaceous hybrids ?
In any case, they had only produced young seedlings at this point, so who knows what the mature plants would look like. However, the fact that they apparently did get two tetraploid lacti seedlings was encouraging I thought, and may be a harbinger of things in the future.
Here's a link to the paper from Koen's site: www.peonysociety.eu/?get_group_doc=4/1656618384-PeonypolyploidsSH2022.pdf