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Post by mnjrutherford on Aug 10, 2010 7:13:54 GMT -5
I sure wish I understood half of what you guys are talking about on this thread! I am trying though, cause it's fascinating!
As for the high sugar soaking up the water faster than the starch (flour) kernels... I would suspect that is because sugar "wets" faster than starch. Put a 1/4 cup of flour in one bowl and a 1/4 cup of sugar in another. Add 1 teaspoon of water to each. The water will disappear instantly into the sugar and quickly disperse into the surrounding grains all the way to the bottom. The sugar is water soluble so it becomes a solution wetting more and more as it moves.
The flour is not water soluble. The water will spend a long time in a puddle. It will only coat the grains. It will eventually disappear into the flour, but only after a few minutes and then it won't go far.
These are observations I have made in cooking. Does it offer any insight to your applications?
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Post by DarJones on Aug 22, 2010 21:37:00 GMT -5
My Silver King is tasseling as of today. It will be about a week before pollen is available. The Cherokee Squaw is 3 or 4 days before tassels will be visible.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Aug 24, 2010 16:30:49 GMT -5
Got tassels on both Cherokee Squaw and Silver King as of today. The Silver king wound up being about 2 days earlier. I pulled tassels from the Cherokee Squaw which had about 1/3 of the tassels visible. I should be able to get the rest the day after tomorrow.
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Post by DarJones on Aug 30, 2010 20:01:53 GMT -5
The Cherokee Squaw has silks finally and there was enough pollen left on the Silver King that I now have at least some seed set. I'll dust pollen again tomorrow to try to increase the set of seed.
At this point, we are about 40 days from frost so it will be a close call whether the corn matures in time. Some years we don't get a frost until the first of November. I'm hoping this is one of those years.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Aug 31, 2010 13:16:53 GMT -5
I dusted pollen on the Cherokee Squaw silks again today. Pollen is becoming sparse from the Silver King. Overlap in this case was about 6 days out of step but there is enough overlap that I will get plenty of seed. I expect to get at least a little pollen tomorrow which should give at least a dozen full ears for next season.
I'm maintaining a record here just in case it can be used by others.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Sept 1, 2010 23:02:19 GMT -5
Silver King pollen is no longer available. I got a very small amount from 2 plants today. Start to finish, it was about 8 days with only 3 days of overlap with Cherokee Squaw. I will wait now to see if the corn ears can mature before frost. Seed mature enough to germinate require about 45 days from pollination. We typically have first frost any time from October 15th to November 10th. That gives me an excellent chance of 45 days and at least a 30% chance we will have 55 days or more before I have to gather the ears.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Sept 6, 2010 11:19:07 GMT -5
I left 2 plants of Cherokee Squaw corn with intact tassels to see when they would start and stop producing pollen. They continued to shed pollen until yesterday which gives about 7 days total that pollen was available. This seems to be typical for most OP corn varieties I've grown though I know of one variety that has pollen shed for 5 days max. Since most OP's have significant variation in start date of pollen shed, the total window for making crosses is probably closer to 14 days. Hybrids are a different story. They tend to produce pollen all at once with at most 3 days variation. This limited my window to make the cross with Cherokee Squaw to about 8 days total and since the Silver King tasseled roughly 5 days before silks were available on the Cherokee Squaw, the overlap was only 3 days. I should get enough seed for breeding work, but if I do this again, the Cherokee Squaw will be planted a week before the Silver King.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Sept 19, 2010 3:19:12 GMT -5
As of yesterday I have edible ears of Silver King corn. I pulled one ear and ate it with great relish. The flavor was excellent, very sweet and with lots of character. I should be able to pull about a dozen or so ears from the plants grown to supply pollen. It was 28 days from first visible tassel to edible ear of corn.
Both Silver King and Cherokee Squaw show signs of drought stress as a result of the high heat and lack of rainfall during early plant growth. I watered just enough to keep the plants alive but not much more. The ears are smaller than normal for Silver king, as in about 1/4 to 1/2 normal. Cherokee Squaw ears seem to be closer to normal diameter but not as long as they should be. This is probably a result of poor pollination for the kernels near the tip. I can feel kernels inside the shucks but have not yet inspected any of the ears.
I expect to have crossbred seed from the Cherokee Squaw that will carry the su and se genes. All of the seed collected this year should be normal starchy type kernels. Selfing next year should produce 1/4 of the kernels with the normal wrinkled sugary form. From the wrinkled seed, 1/4 should be homozygous for both su and se genes. In other words, I should get 1 kernel in 16 that is the correct genotype. For this reason, I hope to plant 4 rows of corn seed across the garden to get enough kernels to experiment with late next year.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Sept 20, 2010 19:13:21 GMT -5
I picked the last few ears of Silver King today. They are fully mature with delicious crisp texture and flavor. Another day and they would have been slightly past the peak. From first tassel peeking out the top of the leaf whorl to final harvest of edible ears of corn was 29 days.
A quick check of a few of the ears on Cherokee Squaw shows that they are forming larger ears than the Silver King and they dealt better with difficult growing conditions. About half of the ears are full with kernels out to the tips of 6 to 8 inch ears. The rest have varying amounts of missing kernels from poor pollination. Overall impression is that the Cherokee Squaw is an outstanding female parent. Seed harvest is about 20 to 25 days away.
DarJones
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Post by DarJones on Oct 5, 2010 18:37:07 GMT -5
I got a real eureka moment today. The Cherokee Squaw corn crossed with Silver King is now mature enough that I harvested a few ears to finish drying indoors. Take a close look at this photo! Now think about the genetics. Cherokee Squaw is a combination strain with both purple and white kernels in the variety. Watching the segregation pattern, it is obvious that something strange is going on with the pure seed. So I picked out pure white kernels and the only seed I planted were white kernels that came from white cobs. The resulting plants became the female parent for these ears of corn. Silver King happens to be a very well known white variety that NEVER makes anything other than white unless it is crossed with another variety with a dominant color. But these ears are pure purple. Every single ear from this cross is pure purple! I now know something about the genetics of Cherokee Squaw that is not at all obvious. Bet a pack of seed nobody can guess what. DarJones
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 5, 2010 19:46:45 GMT -5
I now know something about the genetics of Cherokee Squaw that is not at all obvious. DarJones My guess: Two or more genes are involved... Located on different chromosomes which explains why they do not follow Mendelian inheritance rules. The silver king provides the dominant gene necessary to turn on the purple gene (or fails to provide the enzyme necessary to consume the purple color). My second guess: is that it is an environmental response: The color of the kernels is not determined only genetically, but is a result of growing conditions... And a slight variation in soil or plant chemistry is enough to affect the chemical responsible for the white/purple color change reaction, similar to what we see in hydrangeas. I grew a number of corn cobs this year that were multi-colored and the determining factor in the color was whether or not the kernels were exposed to sunlight. (For example: kernels exposed to sunlight were red. Kernels not exposed were yellow.) I am imagining "Barber-pole Corn". It would be made by shucking the cob while it was still yellow, and wrapping a ribbon around it to shade some of the kernels. You would end up after harvest with a spiral of yellow kernels on a red cob... Or "Designer cobs" in which your farm's logo showed up as different color kernels than the rest of the cob. Regards, Joseph
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Post by jonnyyuma on Oct 6, 2010 13:53:18 GMT -5
Epistasis
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Post by DarJones on Oct 6, 2010 16:01:35 GMT -5
Close Jonny, but no cigar. Epistasis would explain the unusual dominant effect if that alone were the issue. The problem comes in that I planted only white kernels from Cherokee Squaw and the pollen parent was Silver King, a well known white corn variety. Epistasis alone can't quite explain it. My suspicion is that this demonstrates a biochemical pathway that is present in Cherokee Squaw and has an activation gene but the pathway is then deactivated by a single gene resulting in white kernels. Silver King has the gene to trigger the biochemical pathway but does not have the deactivation gene. I'm trying to keep technical terms out of this explanation but if anyone wants it the hard way I'll go into details. Maybe a better way to say this is that epistasis is a very broad brush stroke that does not quite explain the observation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpistasisDarJones
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 6, 2010 17:13:54 GMT -5
Same thing happened to me the first time I planted hard (non-sweet) corn. I had a cob that had multicolored kernel's some of them flinty some floury and a few had slight chinmarks. The ONLY kernels from the cob I planted were floury and dead white. When I got the resulatant two cobs at the end of the year (I didn't know how to plant back then, so pollination was abysmal) one had about 20 kernels of which at least 2/3 were blue and 3/4 were flint (some were of course both, which is why the faractions don't add up) the other cob came out entirely red almost (it had that kind of coloration where the skin is red but fades out to clear near the top of the kernel) the shape chaged too (the orginals were wide and flat, the ones I got were basically button shaped) but that I chalk up to the bad pollination (i.e. no kernels pushing against other kernels, so the ones there expanded all the way around)
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Post by jonnyyuma on Oct 6, 2010 19:39:33 GMT -5
"Epistasis is the phenomenon where the effects of one gene are modified by one or several other genes, which are sometimes called modifier genes." (Wiki)
"My suspicion is that this.....an activation gene but the pathway is then deactivated by a single gene resulting in white kernels. Silver King has the gene to trigger the biochemical pathway but does not have the deactivation gene" (DarJones)
"Maybe a better way to say this is that epistasis is a very broad brush stroke that does not quite explain the observation." (DarJones)
I can see how my general Epistasis reply is seen as vague. I think the concept of Epistasis is very vague in and of itself. I think what you are describing is Epistasis as presented.
Interesting nonetheless.
Jonny
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