Genetic Analysis of Plant Regenerability in Oats (Avena spp. L.)

Journal of New Seeds2002Vol. 4(4), pp. 31–40

Rowena Y. Kelley, Manjit S. Kang, Allan Zipf, Darrell E. Wesenberg, Govind C. Sharma

Abstract

The objective of this study was to estimate genetic effects for transfer of regenerability in oats. Corbit, an agronomically important oat cultivar, was crossed with the highly regenerable, but agronomically undesirable line, GP-1. Callus was induced from mature seeds of each parent (P1 and P2); F1, F2 and their reciprocals; and backcross (BC1 and BC2) generations. The number of somatic embryos was recorded before transfer to regeneration medium and the number of plants regenerated was recorded. Gene effects, using generation mean analysis, were computed when GP-1 was the maternal parent (Set 1) and when Corbit was the maternal parent (Set 2). From this study we conclude that selection for callus weight and plant number would be expected to produce only small gains per cycle because of the substantial negative d X d and dominance effects and these two traits might not be improved simultaneously when selection is practiced for one of them. However, two important characters-callus fresh weight and plant number-were positively correlated when GP-1 was chosen as the maternal parent. Therefore, back-cross strategies for improvement would need to take into consideration the direction of the cross as the highly regenerable plant characteristics observed were considerably influenced by maternal inheritance.

Abstract

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