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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

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Cold-resistant polyploid vine anyone?

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Cold-resistant polyploid vine anyone?

Yeah but but. I was only told this. Haven't seen anything to back it up, and the bloke who told me ( who is a wellspring of amazing and obscure botanical facts ) is out of range for a few more weeks

So I was wondering whether anyone knew more than Google about those claims, or had enough experience with polyploid mutation to be able to describe trends they've noticed

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would it be safe to say that polyploid morphology would be related to the % of polyploid cells in the plant ?

or generally speaking, when a plant is transformed into polyploid does the plant favor the polyploid cells and reduce levels of replication in wild type cells, thus resulting in 100% polyploid cell type ?

Another question, while im at it, would polyploid pollen cross with a wild type female, or would both need to be polyploid to make the cross possible?

Really interesting topic, but unfortunately at this point in time, i dont have any experience with polyploid cactus, just lots of questions

Although it has been suggested that TBM is polyploid, at this point in time, im not certain of how to go about testing that theory

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If you have access to a microscope, you might be able to check them this way - seemed like a moderately-reliable method, especially for how simple it is.

"Another method is to look at the stomates, the breathing holes on the underside of the leaf. They are microscopic, so you’ll need a microscope, and then there are two methods you can use. First method: apply some clear nail polish to the bottom surface of the leaf (you’ll also need a control leaf to compare against), and when dry, carefully peel it off. Examine under a microscope and measure the length (not width) of the guard cells (there are two guard cells on each stomate). If it’s doubled the guard cells will be twice as big, more or less. The second method is to count the chloroplasts of the guard cells. Guard cells typically have fewer chloroplasts than normal leaf cells, and doubled cells will have twice as many."

The original paper which I think they've taken these ideas from is here:

Identifying Polyploids of Various Cucurbits by Stomatal Guard Cell Chloroplast Number

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It was always my understanding that the entire plant would be considered polyploid. There could be exceptions for polyploid mutations on a recently mutated section of the plant that was polyploid and the original growth that hadn't mutated was not polyploid.

I'd speculate in wild mutations sometimes it would be similar to a sport or a witches broom and just affect part of the plant but there would be other types of mutation caused by environmental factors that could affect the entire plant soon after germination. In artificial mutations like we saw in the 80"s with cannabis using colchicine as a mutagen, seed treatment was one of the methods commonly used. It had a really high mortality rate on the seeds and the few surviving seeds showed a high percentage of polyploidy.

In the case of wheat, it's believed that the commercial varieties are nearly all if not all polyploid because of cross polination from mutated plants. So it seems the polyploid genes can be carried in pollen to create polyploid offspring in the F1 and subsequent generations.

Edited by Sally

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Is it the gas ? , nang the pollen to make it polyplod.

Edited by Sally
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I think it should be pretty possible to figure out how to build some kind of pressure vessel capable of holding around 600kPa.
Then you could discharge a heap of nos into it and let it sit for a few days to induce the polyploidy.
Could vent the gas back into a storage cylinder so very little is lost.
Seems interesting

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600 kPa is only about 87 psi, so making the pressure vessel would be very easy. You could do it with an off the shelf pneumatic/hydraulic cylinder with a piston on a rod. Then a wine press type of arrangement could compress the gas.

You could charge it with a nang and then screw it down to until it reaches the desired pressure. It would need a check valve on the input where the nang screws in so it doesn't pop the nang out when you screw it down. You could also compress it with a shop press or a car jack if you didn't want to go the trouble of making a screw press.

I've made heaps of similar things.

I'd recycle the gas, but it wouldn't be used for that purpose again.

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Is it the gas ? , nang the pollen to make it polyplod.

Indeed! I'm sure at least one of those articles indicates that the NO treatment is less lethal than trifluralin and oryzalin.

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Can I have my gold star on my forehead ?

I want to make the neighbours jealous.

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The nos looks way more effective than the other chemicals tested.
I'd be really interested in figuring out the mechanism behind that. Will have to look into it more tomorrow and during the week.
Always an interesting topic with the polyploidy haha

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It was always my understanding that the entire plant would be considered polyploid. There could be exceptions for polyploid mutations on a recently mutated section of the plant that was polyploid and the original growth that hadn't mutated was not polyploid.

There are many cases where transformed/ mutated cells do not constitute all of the cells in an organism, and are held to be chimeric.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29#Plants

It's why GM teks use reporter or selection genes along with the GOI ( gene of interest ) to ensure that only transformed cells survive the process

IME in polyploidy under TC conditions, you would clone from the smallest identified clean structure that is checked and confirmed for ploidy, to try to avoid chimerism.

The NOS tek is cool, but do remember you'd still need to run control/ kill curves. NOS may take away some of the hassle, but not all of it. But hey, NOS :D

Anodyne ta for the stomata basement scope tek, I've been meaning to look it up and check my mutants, but I've been lazy.

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Interesting!i was just looking into mashing two varieties of Venus fly trap together

to try to get one successful tetraploid mutant to clone as a new cultivar.

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