I remember producing some haploid plants from Tobacco anthers 30 years ago when I worked in a research lab. Tobacco is one of the wonder plants for plant tissue culture you can do almost anything with it and lots of the original tissue culture techniques were developed using Nicotiana tabacum var Wisconsin 38. Why this variety of tobacco, who knows how it was picked, but it was the variety used in Folke Skoog's Lab at the University of Wisconsin, where we got Murashige and Skoog medium, the first really successful tissue culture medium for plants. Techniques were later developed to create haploid plants for almost all major crop plants.
It would be interesting to have some haploid orchids would be, in plant breeding haploids are used as a rapid way to produce homozygous hybrid plant lines with selected characteristics. Researchers have produced haploid plants in all most all major crop plants they are then converted to diploid plants before they are used in breeding. Companies dealing in breeding most cereal crops. maintain thousands of homozygous lines and create new ones all the time. These homozygous lines are then crossed to produce the many hybrids raised by farmers around the world. If you want more information, do a google search for haploid or haploid in plant breeding. If we could produce haploid orchids easily, it would be interesting with species to be able to produce haploid orchids with specific unique characteristics that are rare in a species. Imagine selecting an albino Paphiopedilum sanderianum, or any orchid that had some unique recessive characteristic. If you could produce haploids it would be a matter of creating thousands of them, changing them to diploid using colchicine and then raising them up and selecting the ones you wanted. Like many other breeding projects most of them would be mediocre, but the few could be exceptional an homozygous for what every characteristics we were selecting for. It would be interesting to see how these plants could be incorporated in to various breeding programs and the interesting new hybrids that could be produced. This is fun to speculate about but I don't know if it will ever happen. Tom Hillson _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) orchids@orchidguide.com http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
