Quote:
Originally Posted by bower
Well.. it is not entirely true that the choice of mother doesn't matter in all cases. That's because some traits (which may or may not be important to you) are more or less strongly affected by maternal DNA - that is, mitochondrial DNA and chloroplast DNA, which come only from the mother plant. I've read for example that specific traits including earliness, cold tolerance, potassium metabolism and even sweetness of the fruit can be affected by the mtDNA and cpDNA of the mother. As I understand it, it may be more difficult to recover the trait if it is coming from the pollen donor instead of from the mother plant. Not to say impossible, but you may end up having to grow more plants perhaps? I actually noticed this effect in some of my breeding lines, and had to go back and reconsider a backcross using an early mother, where the earliness I hoped for didn't turn up in the F2. It was easy to find early plants in that cross!
So it can sometimes matter.  |
Thanks for the correction and clarification, Bower. I'm a noob also.