Free Newsletters - Space - Defense - Environment - Energy
by Staff Writers
Vienna, Austria (SPX) Nov 29, 2013
Plants can reproduce in a multitude of different ways, unlike humans and animals. Scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna have been working on developing new varieties of chamomile that can be cultivated as a medicinal plant. The researchers have been trying to identify varieties that will bloom longer and make its cultivation easier. Their methods and results have recently been published in the scientific press.
Chamomile is a medicinal plant used mainly in the treatment of stomach and intestinal diseases, including the field of veterinary medicine. Agricultural scientist Bettina Fahnrich from the Institute of Animal Nutrition and Functional Plant Compounds has been focusing on the genetics of chamomile (Matricaria recutita). She has been looking for chamomile varieties with a triploid (threefold) set of chromosomes instead of the natural diploid (double) set.
Plants with the triploid form produce blooms that last longer and have a longer harvesting period. An additional advantage of a triploid variety of chamomile is that most of the seeds produced would be sterile.
This slows down the reproductive cycle so that the plant would not germinate in the following season, when the farmer wants to grow another crop in the field. This means less chamomile has to be removed as a weed in subsequent years. But finding such a triploid variety did not turn out to be an easy task.
Chamomile is genetically conservative
That means that it doesn't change its genetics easily. Other plants are much more flexible," Fahnrich explains. Producing triploid chromosome sets has become common practice when cultivating ornamental plants such as marigolds and begonias, but it proved harder in chamomile.
Developing a suitable chamomile cultivar
However, when they screened naturally occurring diploid and artificially generated tetraploids (with fourfold chromosome sets), what they found in the tetraploids were frequent deviations from the expected set of chromosomes. It appears that the artificially mutated genomes in the tetraploids have a less stable genome than the natural forms; but even so, they did not produce any triploid varieties.
Investigating fertilization in chamomile
She crossed all these cultivars in both parental directions. The fertility of the pollen produced by the subsequent generation diminished significantly. The next step was to identify which crosses produced offspring that were almost infertile in pollen. These varieties would be the most promising for breeding, because they could be used as suitable mother lines for targeted plant crossing.
Generally, there are plants that can only fertilize themselves, and then there are plants that only fertilize others. Some plants can do both. Determining the extent of these different types of fertilization was one of Fahnrich's research aims. For breeding, the researchers are looking for varieties that cannot do self-fertilisation, because these types could easily be crossed with specific father plants.
Research for herbal medicine
The study "Self-incompatibility and male sterility in six Matricaria recutita varieties", by B. Fahnrich, P. Nemaz and Ch. Franz was published in the Journal of Applied Botany and Food Quality.
University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna
Farming Today - Suppliers and Technology
|The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2014 - Space Media Network. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement|