I wonder if gibberellic acid or other auxins could be applied to a female mulberry to produce male flowers, it could be very useful for breeding
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WHA??? a 308 Chromosome number Morus nigra!? They can get that high?
If so what’s stopping them from crossing with Jackfruits or at least being graft compatible. Surely your can atleast try some intergeneric crosses no?
Crazy how chromosome numbers even stacked that high.
Fantastic Question! I wonder if grafting male branches into female trees & Vice versa can achieve the same thing without needing gibberellic acid?
Auxins can be trained by summer pruning & bending branches sideway so that they shift hormonal balance towards fruiting instead of vegetative growth
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Those male trees would contribute unknown fruit quality to the offspring and would thus be far less valuable for breeding.
If a known high quality female could be forced to produce male pollen then we know the offspring would have high quality female fruits on both sides of the breeding line
There is nothing stopping you from grafting a male onto a female
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Who else do you breed for fruit quality? Do we just make the good cultivar to convert into a Male flowers (Apparently it happens occasioanlly, some wild trees shift).
And what about mentor grafting onto the young hybrid seedlings?
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Like with Persimmons, some prefer to breed exclusively with pollen from cosexual/monoecious/hermaphrodite trees that bear good fruits (a la ‘Early Golden’ in the case of Diospyros). I posted about my mulberry experiments not too long ago here:
To another point, I don’t believe having similar chromosome numbers is enough to make different species compatible (every Morus nigra is 22n, with some speculating it’s actually just a highly polyploid descendent of M. alba). The Jackfruit in my friend’s greenhouse has yet to produce any unusual seedlings at least (quite a few mulberries around), but maybe I’ll try that experiment just for the hell of it next year - or if someone further north wouldn’t mind providing the pollen, mulb season is just about over in Florida.
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Perhaps, I think Mulberry pollen should be able to remian viable after freezing but I couldn’t found enough pollen to collect, mostly just female trees cuz the male ones were out of reach or hidden in the forrest.
If you do store pollen via freezing, mix it with all kinds of Morus spp. pollens you can get & all kinds of Artocarpus spp. pollen you can get & then apply to both plants flowers. This way you can up your chances of getting a cross, also grafting mulberry scions onto jackfruit & viceversa will also additionally increase chances (Especially if your grafting hybrid Jackfruit seedlings scions onto mature mulberries rootstock & hybrid Mulberry seedlings scions onto mature jackfruit rootstock).
Would mulberries work like how figs work (like how the edible caprifig trait is passed to 100% of its caprifig offspring, and how if two edible caprifigs are crossed 100% of the offspring are edible caprifigs), since they are partly related? I just found a mulberry that has male and female flowers, would it work the same?
In my mind that’s an undesirable trait because it would possibly pass on the hermaphroditic trait.
You would ideally want your mulberry to be a pure female
I don’t think ANYTHING works like figs
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Too bad. I was thinking it would be usefull if it did work that way and have the male trees be able to pruduce edible fruit with in using its pollen for breeding half the offspring female and half the males that also produce fruit.