Oh, I’m right there with you! I spent much of the last 45 minutes trying to figure out if I could reasonably carry out a 2 year quarantine on plant material! My findings are inconclusive thus far.
In the hybrid progeny from free pollination of the ‘Kolhospnytsia’ cultivar with the American persimmon D.virginiana in the genealogy, a new cultivar ‘Dar Sofiyivky’ has been selected. It combines increased winter hardiness with good fruit quality, early fruit production and early ripeness.
@Harbin Do you know which cultivar ‘Kolhospnytsia’/ Колгоспниця might correspond to in English? I’m curious about parentage. The article also doesn’t seem to say which D. virginiana was pollen donator. It’s free pollination, but they must have an inventory what was on site, so possibilities should be limited.
At home the name of this khaki is “cadeau de Sofia”.
For you this is Sofia’s gift.
For your question on Kolgospnitsa, there is no translation. It is a hybrid from the same breeder that produces 230 grams of fruit.
Various pollinators are possible.
If you have pollinators, you will realize that a pollination which coincides one year does not coincide the other. As a result you put several pollinators, and you do not do controlled pollination. This is what has been done here. He’s the one who created Universal as well.
@JustPeachy you are right Колгоспниця is a mother parent of Dar Sofiyivky. It means exactly Kolkhoz woman - to understand why such a name…the breeder is from an old school and still remembers past regime (for good or bad). Колгоспниця is a direct offspring from Nikita’s Gift backcrossed with monoecious kaki. Breeder never mentions pollen donors. It is a top quality hybrid with large fruit and good hardiness but it is very late ripening.
The cross for Dar Sofiyivky was made in Nova Kakhovka breeding station - a workplace of a breeder at that time. Seeds thus obtained were not fully developed. They were sent to Sofiyivka Dendrological Park (or arboretum if you like) with a tissue culture facility to secure germination. Plants grown there were sent back to Derevyanko for further evaluation.
Plant was released in 2017 so it is still quite new. It follows from the foregoing that Gift of Sofiyivka is a correct translation.
Astringent of course, non astringent hybrid doesn’t exist. Astringency disappears when fruits turn soft.
If you don’t like them soft you can load them into a box with alcohol vapors for 2-3 days. It’s as easy as that.
Ok, that’s what I thought, but thanks for confirming. And thanks for sharing this. You’ve brought a lot of exciting persimmon varieties to my attention, but this may be the most promising one yet.
Yeah, that’s what I figured too. But I don’t know enough about the genetics of astringency to know whether a non-astringent variety could arise from a D. virginiana x non-astringent D. kaki cross.
As far as I know the genome responsible for non astringency of the japanese kaki cultivars is recessive.
On the other hand there is one chinese non astringent kaki in which the genome is dominant - but it has a poor fruit quality and is very late ripening. A difficult task for would be breeders, I guess.
@jrd51 I forget who, but someone on here pointed out that since the kaki, hybrids, and most virginiana are hexaploid, you need to eliminate the dominant astringent gene from all 6 slots. In your regular diploid punnet square, you have a 1 in 4 chance of getting just the recessive trait. My conditional probability is a little rusty, but suffice to say it’s much lower odds in the hexaploid condition. And, since the non-astringent is only in full kaki cultivars, you’d probably need to do a lot of backcrossing to kaki, unless someone identifies an American persimmon that has at least one non-astringent allele. I think the easiest approach would be to do a gene editing technique, but I think that’s still too expensive for a relatively niche thing like hybrid persimmons.
@jcguarneri – Thanks, makes sense. Here’s the math, I think: If the “coin” has two sides (e.g., dominant or recessive) and we need the coin to turn up “tails” (i.e., recessive) twice, that’s (1 / 2) ^ 2 = 1/4. If we need the coin turn up tails six times, that’s (1 / 2) ^ 6 = 1/64.
That’s what I thought at first, too. But I don’t think that’s quite it. The reason being that since it’s really three copies of the same gene, rather than 3 independent genes, the recessive gene in one slot from one parent could theoretically pair with the dominant or recessive gene from any of the three slots in the other. Otherwise, the only way you could get a non-astringent is if both parents completely lack any dominant (astringent) genes. I THINK this would make the overall odds somewhat better than 1/64, but I’m not sure. And, I’m definitely no geneticist; my genetics knowledge caps out at Bio 2 in college!
I think if you crossed something like JT-02 which should have 3 copies of the non-astringent allele back to a non-astringent kaki male, then 1/6 the offspring should be non-astringent. Would that make sense for hexaploid persimmons?
There was some breeding work in Japan to expand the gene pool of non-astringent kaki, and their numbers weren’t so abysmally low in regards to non-astringent offspring from backcrosses.
