Cross Breeding Plant: A Guide for Beginners
Do you love plants and want to create your varieties?
Would you like to learn how to combine the best features of different plants into one?
Do you want to impress your friends and teachers with plant-breeding skills?
If you answered yes to these questions, this article is for you!
In this article, you will learn what crossbreeding plants, how it works, why it is essential, and how to do it yourself.
Crossbreeding plants is creating new varieties of plants with desirable traits by mixing the genes of two or more parent plants. It is a fun and rewarding activity that can help you improve your plant collection and knowledge of plant genetics.
What Is Cross Breeding?
- Increasing the diversity and variation of plants
- Improving the quality and quantity of crops
- Enhancing the resistance and tolerance of plants to pests, diseases, and environmental stresses
- Creating new and unique shapes, colors, flavors, and scents of flowers and fruits
- Discovering new and valuable genes and traits for future breeding
Crossbreeding is a type of plant breeding that involves crossing two or more plants to improve or develop a new cultivar with some or all of the characteristics of the parent plants. The new plant is called a hybrid plant or a crossbred plant.
Crossbreeding plants can be done by nature or by humans. Nature crossbreeds plants through pollination, which is the transfer of pollen from one plant to another. Pollination can happen by wind, water, insects, birds, or animals. Humans crossbreed plants by manually pollinating flowers or using other methods such as grafting or tissue culture.
Crossbreeding plants can result in many benefits, such as:
How Does Cross Breeding Plants Work?
Crossbreeding plants combine the genetic material of two or more parent plants into one offspring plant. The genetic material of plants is stored in their cells in structures called chromosomes. Chromosomes contain many genes that control the traits and functions of plants.
When two plants are crossed, their chromosomes are mixed in their offspring through meiosis. Meiosis is a type of cell division that reduces the number of chromosomes by half and shuffles them randomly. This creates new combinations of genes that can result in new traits in the offspring.
The offspring of crossbreeding plants can inherit different traits from their parent plants depending on how their genes are combined. Some traits are dominant, meaning they will always appear in the offspring if one or both parents have them. Some traits are recessive, meaning they will only appear in the offspring if both parents have them. Some traits are co-dominant or incompletely dominant, meaning they will appear as a blend or a mix of both parents’ traits.
For example, let’s say we crossbreed two true-breeding pea plants with different flower colors: purple (PP) and white (pp). The capital P represents the dominant gene for purple color, and the lowercase p represents the recessive gene for white color. The offspring will have one gene from each parent (Pp) and purple flowers because purple is dominant over white.
- Create new plant varieties with better traits than their parent plants, such as higher yield, better quality, longer shelf life, or more resistance to pests and diseases.
- Discover new genes and traits useful for future breeding or research, such as genes that can help plants adapt to climate change or produce new substances.
- Preserve plants’ genetic diversity and variation, essential for their survival and evolution.
- Enjoy the beauty and diversity of plants, which can enrich our lives and environment.
However, we crossbreed two hybrid pea plants with purple flowers (Pp). In that case, their offspring will have different combinations of genes (PP, Pp, pP, pp). They will have different flower colors: 75% purple (PP + Pp + pP) and 25% white (pp) because the white gene is recessive and will only appear if both parents have it. The below table is also called a peanut square.
Why Is Cross Breeding Plants Important?
Crossbreeding plants is vital because it can help us improve our plant collection and our knowledge of plant genetics. By crossbreeding plants, we can:
How to Cross Breed Plants Yourself?
What are crossbreeding plants?
Crossbreeding plants yourself can be a fun and rewarding hobby that can help you improve your plant collection and knowledge of plant genetics. You can crossbreed plants yourself by following these steps:
How do crossbreeding plants work?
Conclusion
Why are crossbreeding plants necessary?
Congratulations! You have learned what crossbreeding plants is, how it works, why it is important, and how to do it yourself. Crossbreeding plants is creating new varieties of plants with desirable traits by mixing the genes of two or more parent plants.
How do you breed plants yourself?
Crossbreeding plants can help you improve your plant collection and your knowledge of plant genetics. It can also help you enjoy the beauty and diversity of plants, which can enrich your life and environment.
- Choose the parent plants that you want to cross. They should be of the same or closely related species and have the traits you want to combine or improve.
- Identify the male and female parts of the flowers of the parent plants. The male part is called the stamen, producing pollen, the yellow dust that carries the male genes. The female part is called the pistil, and it receives the pollen, which fertilizes the ovules that have the female genes.
- Transfer the pollen from one plant to another. You can use a brush, a cotton swab, or your finger to gently collect some pollen from the stamen of one plant and dab it onto the pistil of another plant. This is called cross-pollination. You can also cut off the stamen of one plant and attach it to the pistil of another plant. This is called grafting.
- Label and protect the cross-pollinated flowers. You can use a tag, a string, or a marker to label the flowers you have cross-pollinated so you remember which ones they are. You can also use a paper bag, a net, or a cloth to cover the flowers and prevent them from pollinating by other plants or insects.
- Harvest and grow the seeds from the cross-pollinated flowers. After a few weeks or months, depending on the type of plant, the cross-pollinated flowers will produce fruits or pods that contain seeds. You can harvest these fruits or pods when they are ripe and dry and extract the seeds from them. You can then sow these seeds in pots or the ground and wait for them to germinate and grow into new plants.
- Observe and evaluate the offspring plants. After a few months or years, depending on the type of plant, the offspring plants will grow and produce flowers and fruits of their own. You can observe these flowers and fruits and see what traits they have inherited from their parent plants. You can also measure and record their characteristics, such as height, weight, color, shape, flavor, yield, or resistance.
What are some examples of crossbred plants?
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- Mule: A hybrid animal that results from crossing a horse and a donkey.
- Liger: A hybrid animal that results from crossing a lion and a tiger.
- Tangelo: A hybrid fruit that results from crossing a tangerine and a grapefruit.
- Broccolini: A hybrid vegetable that results from crossing broccoli and Chinese kale.
- Sunflower: A hybrid flower that results from crossing different species of sunflowers.
What are some challenges or risks of crossbreeding plants?
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- Incompatibility: Some plants may not be able to crossbreed with each other because they have different numbers or structures of chromosomes or genes.
- Sterility: Some hybrid plants may be unable to produce fertile seeds or reproduce themselves because they have an odd number of chromosomes or genes.
- Loss of diversity: Some hybrid plants may lose some of their parent plants’ original traits or genes because others dominate them.
- Unpredictability: Some hybrid plants may have unexpected or undesirable traits or genes not present in their parent plants because they are caused by mutations or recombination.
Thank you for reading, and happy plant breeding! 🌱
FAQs
Crossbreeding plants is creating new varieties of plants with desirable traits by mixing the genes of two or more parent plants.
Crossbreeding plants combine the genetic material of two or more parent plants into one offspring plant through pollination or grafting.
Crossbreeding plants is vital because it can help us improve our plant collection and knowledge of plant genetics. By crossbreeding plants, we can create new and unique shapes, colors, flavors, and scents of flowers and fruits, enhance the resistance and tolerance of plants to pests, diseases, and environmental stresses, and discover new and valuable genes and traits for future breeding.
You can crossbreed plants yourself by following these steps:
Some examples of crossbred plants are:
Some challenges or risks of crossbreeding plants are:
Originally published at https://www.plantbreeding.live.
