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Gardening with Allen: How are new plant varieties developed?

By Allen Wilson
Published: February 8, 2018, 6:05am

I have noticed that most of the All-America award-winning varieties have the designation F1 following the names when I checked online. What does F1 mean?

“F1” is shorthand for “first generation hybrid.” Seed of varieties with this designation after the name has been produced from a cross between two unrelated, highly selected parent varieties under closely controlled situations to prevent pollination from other varieties. In most cases plants are hand pollinated inside closed greenhouses. These two parents or “parent lines” are genetically very uniform which means every seed contains almost the exact same genes from each parent. This makes seeds like identical twins so plants from these seeds are very uniform in all characteristics. Because the two parents are from diverse backgrounds, the resulting cross gives the offspring “hybrid vigor.”

Plants are more vigorous, higher yielding and more rapid growing than comparable non-hybrid varieties. Seeds harvested from these F1 hybrid plants will be very diverse, ranging in extreme from one parent to the other and everything in between.

Although this process is highly controlled, the same thing happens at random in nature resulting in a diversity of plants which will grow under a variety of conditions, giving the species greater survivability. Man began improving plants by selecting individual plants from nature which were better adapted.

This F1 hybrid process gives the plant breeder greater control so he can reap greater rewards from his/her efforts.

Many, if not most, newly released plant varieties are hybrids, even if they are not designated as such. The most popular method of producing new varieties of ornamental plants currently is by propagation without seeds. Many different crosses are made between promising variable parent plants.

The seeds from these crosses are not uniform, because the parents were not bred for generations to become uniform. However, a single plant from a cross may be outstanding in some way and is selected as a new variety. Plants of this one outstanding plant are produced by cuttings or more rapidly from tissue culture.

Tissue from the parent plant is grown on agar in a laboratory. Thousands of tiny new plants are then grown into mature plants in greenhouses. The new plants are extremely uniform, because they all came from the same individual plant. They are also vigorous because the parents were unrelated.

We hear a lot about cloned animals in the news. Cloning from a single plant has been one of the primary ways of propagating plants for centuries.

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