Plant Ploidy testing news

Every year hybridizers face the same question when trying to pollinate plants. Why are some plants so difficult to set pods of seeds, while other plants set pods on nearly every flower pollenated? The answer to this question seems to lie in the plant’s ploidy (or number of pairs of chromosomes). Daylilies for example naturally have eleven pairs or 22 total chromosomes and are referred to as diploid. In order to increase the vigor and robustness of daylilies, growers chemically convert the plants to tetraploid (eleven sets of 4 homologous chromosomes or 44 total chromosomes). The problem with chemical conversion is that during the treatment process, only the cells that are actively dividing get an increase in their chromosome number. In reality, converted plants end-up with a mixture of cells with different ploidy. This plethora of ploidy can exist within and between the 3 germ layers of tissue “difficult” or pod sterile. To make matters even worse, recent testing indicates that incomplete pairs of chromosomes and/or chromosome segments result from chemical conversion. The consequences are plants with partial ploidy or a chromosome numbers outside the normal homologous pairings. An example might be a plant with 3.7 N or 4.2 N ploidy (where N represents the haploid chromosome number or one chromosome from each pair). Because plants exhibit a myriad of different levels of chromosome ploidy, a database could be created from results, listing the tested ploidy of plants needs to be created as a reference for hybridizers. Instead of wasting valuable time guessing which plants are genetically compatible, breeders would be able to match plants of the same ploidy and plan their crosses in advance, thus, increasing pollination efficiency and the number of fertile pod sets. We offer this service, until now was only used by major cooperation’s and universities. Contact us for more information or purchase via our shopping cart for the amount of samples you want analyzed.