questions about seeds

[brownie]

hello. I recently read this through another thread
[ sarracenia.proboards.com/thread/4004/seedling-selection. ] 

In particular, through Mike's writing and discussions with others, it was really impressive to read each other's opinions on the common concerns of seed growers, what to choose and what to throw away, and whether the abandoned plants are worth it.



I was curious too, so I created a thread,
but I'm not sure if this is an appropriate question since it's from my beginner's point of view. ^^;



Usually experienced growers won't buy other people's seeds, but...



1. As a beginner, what do you look for when purchasing seeds?



Do you buy seeds from hard-to-find or expensive breeds,
or from expectations that you can predict by looking at your parents, or simply out of curiosity?

Or do you choose by looking at a specific color (black, pink, hot pink, burgundy, white) or a red strip??




2. Also when buying seeds, for example...

Assume that when Flava(mother) x Ellie wang (pollen) is $5, then Ellie wang(mother) x Flava(pollen) is $20.

In that case, is the result very different between the $5 seed and the $20 seed? My question is, do the $5 seeds produce the same characteristics as the $20 seeds, and if the results are similar, why are the $20 seeds more expensive?



Are traits more likely to be present in the mother than in the pollen?



(Here, the resemblance to Ellie Wang is not important,
I just wonder if the results of the $5 seed and the $20 seed are similar or different?)






3. This is a question for growers.

Usually, when flowers bloom, what standards do you breed when you cross pollen?



When flowers bloom, do you have to crossbreed because there are no other pollen flowers? Or, for what purpose, do you crossbreed while imagining the outcome? Or do you use recently registered varieties as pollen and show them to others ambitiously? Etc., etc., on what criteria do you cross pollen with flowers?



If there is a thread related to this question, I will delete this post and read it.

[johannsgarden]

Because of pollination contamination (which can happen even when very careful) you're guaranteed to know that at least the female parent is correct. While the male parent may also be correct it may not always be possible to 100% guarantee. I recall some genetic testing done in recent years on selectively bred apples where both parents were "known" and crossed with great care. Turns out that DNA testing revealed some of the resulting progeny had unexpected pollen parents other than what had been intended despite all the techniques employed to control the pollination.

That's the main reason I could think of why price would be different depending on which is the female parent. The other difference is supply and demand. You only have so many flowers on a given high cost clone, but if you use its pollen on flowers of other clones you could potentially produce a much higher number of seeds using it as the male parent than if using it as the female parent. The more limited of the two options will likely be the higher price cross due to lower availability.

[johannsgarden]

And personally I'd rather make crosses I haven't seen done before as opposed to buying seeds of expensive designer crosses. If someone's already making the crosses it's cheaper for me to just buy a division of their best resulting seedling once they start cloning it rather than try to replicate their work growing out all those seedlings and selecting. It's a way better use of my time to make crosses that I want (based on what I can imagine resulting from them), but can't get from other breeders.

[brownie]

Jan 12, 2023 22:26:36 GMT -5 johannsgarden said:

Because of pollination contamination (which can happen even when very careful) you're guaranteed to know that at least the female parent is correct. While the male parent may also be correct it may not always be possible to 100% guarantee. I recall some genetic testing done in recent years on selectively bred apples where both parents were "known" and crossed with great care. Turns out that DNA testing revealed some of the resulting progeny had unexpected pollen parents other than what had been intended despite all the techniques employed to control the pollination.

That's the main reason I could think of why price would be different depending on which is the female parent. The other difference is supply and demand. You only have so many flowers on a given high cost clone, but if you use its pollen on flowers of other clones you could potentially produce a much higher number of seeds using it as the male parent than if using it as the female parent. The more limited of the two options will likely be the higher price cross due to lower availability.

thank you. In the end, no matter how well the pollen crosses, and no matter how well the pollen is prevented from being contaminated with the mesh, it may not have crossed properly because there are variables.



Does the second comment mean that it is better in terms of time and money to buy sprouts of plants that others have sowed rather than to buy seeds myself? (if possible)

[sarr]

Jan 12, 2023 22:26:36 GMT -5 johannsgarden said:

Because of pollination contamination (which can happen even when very careful) you're guaranteed to know that at least the female parent is correct. While the male parent may also be correct it may not always be possible to 100% guarantee. I recall some genetic testing done in recent years on selectively bred apples where both parents were "known" and crossed with great care. Turns out that DNA testing revealed some of the resulting progeny had unexpected pollen parents other than what had been intended despite all the techniques employed to control the pollination.

That's the main reason I could think of why price would be different depending on which is the female parent. The other difference is supply and demand. You only have so many flowers on a given high cost clone, but if you use its pollen on flowers of other clones you could potentially produce a much higher number of seeds using it as the male parent than if using it as the female parent. The more limited of the two options will likely be the higher price cross due to lower availability.

Another potential reason could be that the mother tends to pass off more of its traits to the offspring. A Ellie wang x flava could potentially look very different than flava x Ellie wang. The former could be redder with a whiter top whereas the second might just look like a normal moorei

[johannsgarden]

The most likely reason for the mother plant to be more dominant in passing along its traits to the offspring is if some of the seeds resulted from self-pollination. Aside from that mitochondrial DNA comes only from the mother verses the nuclear DNA which comes 50/50 from each parent. Therefore if any important traits were controlled by mtDNA that would make selection of the mother plant more important. I don't think enough research has been done on Sarracenia mtDNA to determine if if any significant amount of the observable traits are controlled by it though.

[hcarlton]

The maternal parent can have significant influence on the offspring in some cases not just due to BOTH mitochondrial and plastid DNA inheritance (which both can also influence the effects of nuclear genes), but also due to epigenetic inheritance factors; not all genes on both sides of that "roughly" 50/50 inheritance of nuclear material are turned on or allowed to function in the offspring, because there's no need for both to function (and much of what's turned on or off is influenced by which allele came from what parent). Whether these impacts are significant enough to see in Sarracenia phenotypes, in question (it seems to be somewhat stronger in groups like Nepenthes, save for when certain species just tend to have dominant phenotypic effects).
The claim for just waiting for someone to produce the best version of a particular cross and then buying a division from them is potentially valid, but then you also run the risk of perhaps the plant you would like best in that cross is not the one they would keep (beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that), so growing crosses out from seeds yourself allows you to choose for yourself what you like. It also allows you to see the breadth of diversity possible in person from a cross, which if you like genetics and inheritance and looking at morphological plasticity it's fun. So picking seed crosses is great if you have the room and patience, and it's really just about what you want in a particular plant. There's no rule about what crosses to go for; it might be size potential, it might be light or dark colors or striping possibility or just making the weirdest plant possible, and in same it doesn't mean you have to buy anything that comes from famous, expensive parents. Those are great because we've often seen what traits those plants more likely pass on while newer cultivars or random clones might be less documented, but you can choose any kind of phenotype you want (such as, I got a whole bunch of S. flava crosses and cross mixes from Steve Galic in the past couple years, and things like Phil Faulisi's Blackwater deep red flava rather expectedly produce crosses full of other very deep red seedlings, but the "dark Carolina atro" mix I got one might expect would produce some good dark plants, but the colors I'm seeing so far in those are more coppery and light reds, which could produce amazing plants and some might darken out later, but there's always an element of surprise and possible hidden potentials in things).