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Fractalhead

Mining for recessive freak-o-types: Haploid entheogenic plants by anther culture?

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Was having a discussion the other day about establishing homozygous gene knockout plants and this led to the possibility of going via a haploid intermediate. This got me thinking again about a paper i read ages ago on anther culture of tobacco to give haploid plants that will happily grow vegetatively but can't produce gametes unless diploidy is restored by intervention with something like colchicine. The process seems to be readily adaptable to new species. Suddenly it occured to me just how readily this process could be applied to our special plants.

The wonderful thing about it is that virtually every haploid plant you produce by anther culture will have a different combination of alleles. Some of these alleles will be recessive in the diploid plant and hence the possibly weird and wonderful characteristics they might impart are not observed in the diploid. Once in the haploid plant, these recessive genes (which might just include genes of secondary metabolism) have a chance to work their magic and show us what they're made of. This has the potential to speed up our plant breeding efforts enormously and yield some weird-arse or particularly kick-arse new chemotypes!

For a rundown on anther culture by androgenesis induction see Wang et al. (2000) Plant Physiology vol 124, pp. 523-530

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some of that i understand. are these haploids induced? and if so, how?

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This has a basic picture of the idea

http://www.plant.uoguelph.ca/research/biot...loid/anther.htm

As far as I can remember anthers from a diploid plant are haploid so the resulting plants would be haploid ( generally ) because no fertilization has occured.

[ 02. July 2004, 23:47: Message edited by: garret ]

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