50 fruits in one cluster
We are currently observing another impressive result of hybrid vigor in our Jatropha Breeding Program: a six months old hybrid exhibits the first fruit cluster with exactly 50 healthy fruits. The seedling germinated on March 17 (my birthday :-)) and has reached a height of more than 2.5 meters by now. Manual pollination has been conducted 10 days ago.
Among other this hybrid also shows a distinctively superior tolerance to drought stress than both parents. As usual drought tolerance goes together with relative (horizontal) pest resistance.
2 sister plants of the identical hybrid which had germinated in the same week are showing similar impressive fruit counts for their first clusters: 35 and 42 respectively.
Hybrid fruit cluster
Update: the same fruit bunch 10 days later…
Update 2: On November 23 we harvested the first fruits from this bunch. Obviously, we were very curious to find out about a possible heterosis effect on seed size and weight. Well, what can I say? It’s another breakthrough really that would deserve its own separate article on this site:
We weighed 15 freshly harvested seeds at a total of 18 grams. This converts into a 100-seed weight of 120g. That’s a new record in our breeding program.
Seed comparison with parental accessions
As a matter of completion, the 100-seed weights of the parents:
- female parent (top left): 90g
- male parent (top right): 45g.
It will be interesting what we are going to see in the next generations of hybrid crosses. The plant has already been crossed with most of our high quality accessions and also back crossing with both parents has begun. We will definitely report again in the future.
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This very good and profitable hybrid, very interested in it can you please help with some. here we have a new project of jatropha where we are mobilizing farmers to also have grown this for commercial, we are lacking more support which one of them is having this type of breed for better and promising future of these local farmers.
thank you
Frighton,
our material is not for sale, sorry. This plant is part of an extensive breeding platform and we offer selected germplasm as part of our services portfolio which includes client site customized breeding programs.
We spend millions on developing unique, high yielding varieties. Giving away intermediary products either for money or for free would endanger the value we are determined to build up over the years.
I think it's a good development in fact amazing. However one question I have is whether this is seen in a few plants or an entire population of thousands. This is very important to be taken note of.
Dr. Vargese, heterosis describes a common effect in plant breeding which is well known and exploited in many crops. If F1 hybrids are produced from the same 2 stable parental lines the result can expected to always be similar. The picture is from one of 3 similar plants we currently observe in our breeding orchard. All 3 show a similar behavior. In addition to the large numbers of female flowers per inflorescence they are also setting new inflorescences at a high speed.
Please note we are not advertising this material for sale in any way.
You should also keep in mind, that your concern is only valid for seed based propagation methods. Any type of cloning, be it through cuttings or tissue culture would always produce identical copies of a superior source with similar properties.