Can alpines hybridize with modern strawberries?

General Fruit Growing
#1

I’m growing some alpines and some modern strawberries. I was hoping to save seed from the alpines but was wondering if they can hybridize with the modern strawberries? Thank you

#2

they have a different amount of chromosomes, and thus don’t hybridize.

I think they did some manipulation to vesca to make it polyploid and did get a successful hybrid with it. But that’s laboratory stuff, won’t happend in your back yard.

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#3

In one of his videos, Mike from strawberry seed store mentioned he keeps one of his seed producing alpines next to modern strawberries and has no issues with cross pollination.

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#4

There is a similar situation with tomatoes and some of their wild relatives such as S. Peruvianum. They are both in the tomato clade but can’t normally be crossed. I have to put in a caveat re the chromosome numbers. Just having different chromosome numbers is not necessarily a barrier. Horses and zebras have different chromosome numbers yet they occasionally manage to make a hybrid zeborse. Of far more importance is when two species have chromosome inversions. An inversion is highly likely to block pachytene pairing which is when chromosomes line up prior to cell division. If the chromosomes can’t pair up, cell division usually fails.

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#5

So alpines can’t cross?

#6

your right, a different chromosome count does not exclude them being able to hybridize.

strawberry’s have 7 base pairs. (haploid)

alpines (vesca) are diploid. (2x)

and i think Antoine Nicolas Duchesne already tied to cross them with ananassa (8x)
That did not work.

Later they doubled the chromosomes of vesca a few times to 12x and crossed that with ananasa to get a 10x vescana

either way, unless your doing laboratory stuff, alpines won’t cross with “modern” strawberries.

And if they by some 1 in a million chance do. Consider yourself lucky.

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#7

i grow Rodluvan i got seed from the strawberry store. its F. vesca/ virginiana cross from a Swedish breeding program. its a very good berry but runners like crazy and isnt as productive as my other 4 cultivars of pure alpines are.