Was discussing polyploidy and mutation breeding with a colleague the other day and he came out with some experiential statements I've been unable to confirm. He's on leave now so I can't have a longer discussion til he returns.
I thought I'd throw the following of his statements out there and see if anyone knows more
1. Polyploidy is cool, and pretty standard stuff in plants. However it's not an increase in secondary metabolites that is the biggest outcome for plants, polyploidy generally first confers an increased immunity to cold temps.
Anyone know more?
And can polyploidy change the actual phytochemical products of a species?
2. No point looking for gross floral morphology changes in a mutant population, flowers are the last things to mutate as the plant has a vested interest in passing on it's genetics using its current methods. So they protect the flowers, and work to make ornamental variatiations of floral morphology is much harder
This one is relevant to me because I was hoping to find floral variations in a mutant population. Haven't seen them. If this line of work is pretty low yielding in terms of results I'll put it on the backburner