Re: HYB: growth problems- epigenetic inheritance

There is also a popular article on the subject in the latest issue of Discover magazine, mostly about inheritance of traits in humans. Fascinating and totally different mechanism of "natural selection". Influence of diet, behavior, and environment, which I assume translates to nutrients & pH, interaction of the plant with environment (how it responds to being eaten by deer & borers, being stepped on), and climate (variability & ranges).

Yes, that does seem to fit with the improved seed set and germination rate of seeds from my own seedlings.

Now to figure out if there are additional ways to use this information in future crosses, other than to keep trying to get breeding stock from similar climate/soil sources.

It does imply that there could be some extra difficulty in selecting seedlings tolerant of difficult growing conditions if the <parents> aren't exposed to those conditions during pollen and pod formation.

Whee, another advantage for us <g> :-(

Steve, I looked through my stuff and found the
reference and it's definitely something different from
natural selection. I had come across it, when I was
"Googling" epigenetic inheritence. I have it saved as
a PDF (Adobe) File and will try to attach it to this
e-mail; if that doesn't work I can e-mail it directly
to anyone interested. The jist of it is, that there
was no selection going on. The caterpillar grazing
induced defensive changes in the plant itself --
higher concentrations of defensive chemicals and
hairs. But more interestingly, the seeds that these
"turned on" plants produced, grew seedlings with those
same defenses still turned on.

----------------

Maybe this same type of adaptive thing is involved
somehow in the observation you mentioned once that
someone had made; that you'd start getting much better
seed set when you started using your own seedlings??




--
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8
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