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Old February 3, 2013   #21
doublehelix
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Central Arkansas
Posts: 190
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Quote:
Originally Posted by b54red View Post
... Every once in a while one will turn out to be a plant that produces markedly smaller fruit but that has been the rare exception. I have been quite surprised by these results. I am no scientist and don't understand the genetics behind hybridization but it would seem to me that the parents must be very similar to the resulting hybrid for this to be the case.
This is quite common because of the size of the population. If you planted a dozen or so seeds every season you might not see any difference. If you planted a few thousand you would see many that were different. Growing small populations over a long period of time you would be able to track many differences just as if you did them all in one season.

This is an important part to this discussion. When 2 or 3 seeds are planted in a segregating population you might think something is stable as early as the F3 as some of the people selling these tomatoes seem to think. When the grow out jumps from 10 or 20 seeds to 2000 seeds they are going to get a hard lesson in statistical analysis of segregating populations.

…And some angry customers.
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