The Seed Detective by Alexander Adam;

Author:Alexander, Adam; [Alexander, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

A Very Modern Plant

The big challenge for breeders has been how to improve varieties through sexual reproduction by cross-pollinating from a number of different clones. A frustrating trait of domesticated garlic is that any flowers that do form rarely produce seeds. A typical flower contains tiny bulbils which are simply more clones of the parent, and these crowd out the flowers and prevent them from developing. Breeders have to remove these bulbils, so the few flowers that remain can be pollinated. The plants must be grown in carefully controlled climatic conditions to reduce bulbil proliferation. This requires patience because the breeder needs to select from the sexually-reproduced offspring specimens that stop making bulbils and focus on delivering true garlic seed. This way of producing new cultivars only started in the 1980s. Before then just a few thousand clones would have been grown over millennia.8

In 1991, the agricultural geneticist Alessandro Bozzini wrote a paper in the scientific journal Economic Botany about a wonderful discovery he had made in 1987. Growing in a field near the small town of Caiazzo some 30 miles north of Naples was a local garlic that produced flowers containing seeds. He took some of this seed back to his lab at the University of Naples and was able to germinate 80 per cent of them – a remarkable rate of fertility.9 Now, perhaps for the first time in history, plant breeders are able to work with crossing and hybridising garlic sexually to create new varieties that can enrich our diet. DNA fingerprinting is also going to help us better understand garlic’s origins and its distribution.

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