So help me understand this. If I currently have a tree that is “Self Pollinating” and it produces fruit, what will that seed produce? Will it produce a tree true to the parent? Will it be a combination of that and something else? My 4 year old wants to plant the seed from a piece of fruit he ate off the tree so he can “make more fruit”. Besides doing it just for science which would end up boring him to death and the fact that he would forget about it a week from now I’m just wondering how one would go about calculating what you would get.
At least 75% of the time, no, it could, but unlikely. Most trees would be nothing special. Although you could produce a superior tree. I would grow it anyway, you can always top work it.
For trees like stone fruits and pommes, the seeds won’t come true to the parent. Even if it’s a self-pollinated tree. The genes recombine to make the offspring.
As an example, see the pic in my User Icon. It’s a very pretty showy blossomed peach tree with fruit not even the birds would want to eat. The fruits look more like the fruits on an almond tree. The volunteer tree grew from the pit of delicious peach with pale pink single blossoms.
I think it comes down to whether the mother has heterozygous chromosomes or homozygous. With heterozygous chromosomes (F1 hybrid plant for example) there will be a large variation in the seedlings after a self pollination. But with homozygous chromosomes (heirloom/OP) a self pollination will give you seeds that are “true to type”. It takes about 10 generations of selection to stabilize lettuce genes, not sure about peaches but it sure would be harder to make the selections.
2 Likes
Some are close to homozygous. The old heirlooms like Indian Blood Cling, and the rootstocks like Lovell. Indian Free is interesting as it is one of the first hybrids.Who could have imagined that Thomas Jefferson grew hybrid peaches? He had about 35 cultivars.
1 Like
I want to add a question.
So if i grow a tree that isn’t zone hardy, but still produces a few flowers/sets fruit and i get that seed. Does that mean because it survived those winter conditions, that seed has superior genetics to handle my local conditions…or am i just so far off?
2 Likes
The short version is that apples for example are unlikely to be like their parent. There are exceptions such as wolf river that will be like their parent Wolf River Story. A detailed version of why an apple will differ from it’s parent can be read about on these links http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v42/n10/full/ng.654.html
A LIFE OF APPLES: Apple Genetics
http://www.pbs.org/thebotanyofdesire/apple-sweetness.php
http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/breaking-ground-the-call-of-the-wild-apple/
http://www.d.umn.edu/external-affairs/homepage/14/apple-research.html
Most - in excess of 75%, in most instances - seedling peaches will be all but indistinguishable from the parent. ‘Trueness’ % is probably even higher for ‘landrace’ types like the Indian Blood, Indian Cling types.
1 Like
I’m surprised as that is so not true for tomatoes and peppers, and other fruits. So many have tried to stabilize Sungold. Most knock offs sold pale in comparison to the hybrid. I didn’t know peach hybrids were so stable. Most accounts on the internet say otherwise. Some good source info would be welcome to clear the confusion. The Indian peaches, we have Indian Blood Cling Peach. And Indian Free peach. These are very different peaches in many ways. Indian Free is a hybrid, and not self fertile, so you will get 0% true. Blood cling is self fertile and stabilized. Seeds for the most part come true.
Lucky,
Can you please tell me where you got that statistic? I once read someone claimed an Elberta seedling will generally come fairly true to type, but I’ve also read in old peach literature farmers could only get 25% of peach seedlings to produce usable fruit.
I’ve not done any planting of peach seedlings for the purpose of testing the offspring, so I don’t know. I have read that Jim Friday with Fruit Acres tested 8000 seedlings to come up with roughly a dozen commercial varieties.
A few years ago I planted about 10 peach seedlings in the rows for grafting. I never did get around to grafting them, or cutting them down. This summer a few of them are producing fruit, so I should see a few results.
I’ve tasted fruit from a seedling nect tree around here before and it was pretty bitter.
2 Likes
Olpea,
The seedlings I grew were just like their seedling parent. The seedlings I grew from larger fruits were just like the rootstock they were grafted on. I suspect the rootstock influences the seedling. I can’t prove that and only had limited experience of a 3 different times lots of seedlings. My grandparents and mom grew peaches like that as well and that was also their experience. The Parent peaches like Lucky said have influence but which parent passes down the genetics is the question. They will be consistent for sure 75 percent of the time. If you take one of your large fruited seedlings and do it again that’s when 75 percent will be like the parent if the variety has stabilized. If you took cuttings from the parents and grew those that might get you the result you wanted. One of my moms peaches was 30’ tall when I was a kid. Some of my grandpas were consistently 8’ tall. Once the variety stabilizes they are the same every time with 1 or 2 occasional exceptions. Since peaches produce in 3 years they are always worth it to grow them out and see in my opinion.
1 Like
Perhaps this paper published in Chile would be of interest here. It says that among stone fruits, peaches have been shown to have been highly inbred. In Section I, paragraph B, the paper states that the heritability of certain peach characteristics has shown a pattern. Some, such as flowering and ripening dates and fruit size have shown high heritability values. Browning, acidity, soluble solids, sweetness, flavor, and taste have demonstrated medium to low heritability values. It goes on to state:
“The inheritance patterns of other traits has shown Mendelian behavior. Dominance has been reported for red flesh over yellow flesh and yellow flesh over white flesh. Low malic acid is dominant over normal level, peach over nectarine, freestone over clingstone, melting flesh over non-melting flesh and normal ripening over slow ripening (“stony hard”, scarce ethylene production) (Scorza and Sherma, 1996; Haji et al., 2005).”
Section II, paragraph D talks about the use of tissue culture to create haplo-diploidization in order to produce homozygous lines, pure lines which can self-replicate.
Since peaches only have 8 sets of chromosomes and are also self-compatible, I think it’s plausible that some relatively, though not completely, stable lines have been developed by people who have repeatedly planted selected seeds of generation after generation from a beginning tree.
I thought it an article that those interested in stone fruit genetics might find interesting.
3 Likes
I wonder what would the F1…F3…F5 seedlings look like if I let my peach x almond hybrid and seedlings to self-pollinate? Would they still have 50 % peach, 50% almond genes in their parentage?
In my understanding, it’s not likely after the first generation.
Imagine you had two boxes containing 16 almond colored marbles and 16 yellow marbles. The boxes represent your current generation pollinating itself.
Now let 8 of those marbles randomly fall through a hole in each box. The combination of what is left is unlikely to be 8 of each color, and more likely to be skewed toward one or the other. If you repeat this a few more times with just a duplicate of what is left in the boxes after each turn, which is what is achieved with flowers pollinated through self-compatibility, you could theoretically eventually wind up with any balance along a teeter-totter of extremes between all almond and all peach.
That’s an over-simplification, but the easiest way I can think to visualize my understanding of genetic transfer between generations.
2 Likes
I think I tried too hard to simplify that. Let me change it.
Each of those boxes has two each of 8 different shaped blocks. One is almond colored and one is peach colored. If you blindly pull out one of each shape from each box and combine those, you’re unlikely to have exactly 8 of each in the new mixture. Some of those new shapes will wind up being pairs where both of that shape are the same color. Since the blocks are representing chromosomes, that means that set of chromosomes is now entirely represented by either peach or almond, not half and half. If you’re doing self pollinating, the following generation can only pull from that one color (fruit) to fill that particular slot. That’s just one set of the 8 sets. The other 7 sets could each be one of each color, or both the same. If you started out with many, many, many different trees doing the same process, their later generations would average 50/50 between them, but any random individual offspring probably wouldn’t be.
I might be completely lousy at trying to explain this concept. I hope I’m not confusing you too much.
1 Like
@MuddyMess_8a’s analogy is good, and a nice way to think about it. At the risk of making it even more confusing, there are a few things to keep in mind. In practice, you won’t have a completely “almond” or “peach” chromosome in the offspring because of homologous recombination or chromosomal crossover. This provides much more genetic diversity because the alternative would be an entire chromosome (and associated genes) coming from one parent or the other, as in the analogy with the colored marbles.
Also, we tend to think of these hybrids as “50/50” but the parent species are closely related. There is quite a lot of homology between the two and a large portion of their genome is shared between the Amygdalus subspecies, in this case, and Prunus in general, so many of the traits in the offspring can’t be classified as exclusively “peach” or “almond”.
As @Drew51 mentioned earlier, there are some varieties, like Lovell, that are fairly homozygous, and these would come true to seed when self-pollinated. Here’s an interesting reesarch article looking at the heterogeneity in a few peach varieties: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4046826/
1 Like
Thanks that was a good article and does confirm that it would be rare for many cultivars to come true from seed. In conclusion I still think it is worth doing. I myself try to breed peaches, but it is a long slow process. Just a hobby. I would like to make a unique cultivar, and will make many as the years go by.
Currently I have been working with raspberries too. I have 4 seedlings I selected that I bred. One looks very promising. I won’t know for about 18 months though.
1 Like
@Drew51, that would be my guess as well. I’m curious to know what the goal would be for stabilizing a peach cultivar so that it breeds true to seed. The reasons for tomatoes and other common OP fruit/vegs are much easier for me to see since we treat them as annuals and they fruit within a single season. Considering the time and space necessary to stabilize a tree fruit variety, I think I’d rather use the resources on unique crosses and just rely on grafting for propagation.
Brambles are a nice subject to work with I bet since, I think, they only take a few years before you get fruit. I may start crossing some stone fruit if I get enough parent varieties to start looking for traits I want to select for. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get quite a few scions next year to start working with.
Well my grafting sucks, so will my breeding probably. Still I move forward. With brambles they need to be scarified, and so nothing is ever easy. Then we have ploidy level issues with blackberries. I’m going to fool with them soon too.
If it’s not one issue, it’s another I guess, LOL. Looking forward to hearing about the blackberry progress.