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Post by templeton on Oct 29, 2012 8:08:51 GMT -5
These must have been answered on a thread somewhere here, perhaps someone can point me in the right direction: Why aren't there any coloured sweet corns? Or are there? Do they taste strange? If I segregate corn seed by color, and plant into blocks so each block has a greater chance of cross pollinating within block, on average am i going to increase the amount of that color? I've segregated the seed by color of some 'Coloured Aztec Corn' I've sourced here in Aust - my guess is it's just a decorative corn. Can someone explain what colors I have? I've heard of lavender, green, magenta, blue and so on, but are they really these colors? See my pic. I have close ups of each lot if interested. And where do stripes fit into the overall scheme of things? Any pointers much appreciated. T Attachments:
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 29, 2012 10:39:52 GMT -5
Around here, commercial sugary enhanced sweet corn seeds are available in white, yellow, bicolor, and red. White or yellow are the only sweet corns that people will buy at the grocery store, and there is no sense growing corn for market that people won't buy. I can't tell whether that is due to a "normalcy bias" or some other reason. Many of the colors associated with sweet corn have a corresponding taste. I grow a tremendous variety of sweet corn colors. I have found a few cobs that are distasteful. Can't attribute that only to the colors though: Sometimes a plain old yellow ear also tastes bad. I suspect that more corn colors will be available in Oz within a couple of growing seasons.
Astronomy Domine sweet corn comes in most every color known to corn. One issue I've noticed is that many of the colors cook to gray which isn't all that exciting. Adding a bit of vinegar or baking soda to the cooking water, or roasting instead of boiling could modify how the colors change during cooking, but I haven't done the work to figure all that out. Plain old selection could also resolve some of those issues.
I also segregate seeds by color and plant into blocks. The offspring of each group are more likely to be like the group (in some cases)... To do this right the colored seeds should be selected while they are still on the cob... That will let you select kernels from mothers for example that have two copies of the yellow endosperm gene. Once you have an individual yellow kernel in hand, you don't know if it has one copy or two of the gene. The grays, lavenders, and purples are particularly hard to segregate as individual kernels. It's much easier to get stable colors if you can look at them while they are still on the cob and say, "This is red pericarp over gray aleruone", and then do your selection based on what you can infer about the genetics of the mother. Once the kernel is off the cob, it can be hard to tell if the color originated in pericarp, aleurone, sap, or endosperm or some combination.
I'd have a better chance of explaining if they were still attached to the cob. Lots of critical information about the genetics of the kernels gets lost once the kernels are separated from the cob.
The stripes are due to "transposons", I don't know much about them, other than I have planted a stable line of sweet corn in the past that had this trait.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 29, 2012 13:06:33 GMT -5
That striped pattern is called "chinmarking" (apparantly one of the Native American tribes that first noted the trait though it looked like the chin tattoos one of the neighboring tribes usually sported.) and it is in trasposon based. It is found in the pericarp (the "skin") which is maternal tissue (so it is basically 100% maternally passed) There is also a (probably) transposon based trait that creates what I refer to as the "turkey feather" patter (a group of superimposed "v"s that make a feather like pattern, though that is rare (I don't think I've seen it outside of Andean corns). A different group of genes in the aleurone layer can result in stippling, which produces kernels with polka dots.
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Post by templeton on Oct 29, 2012 15:44:39 GMT -5
thanks for the replies. I had forgotten AD was a sweet corn. I think I'll be doing a bit of hand pollination and bagging this season. The first of my se+ are showing in the cells. Must get this coloured corn presoaked.
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Post by Andre on Jun 25, 2013 17:46:49 GMT -5
I also segregate seeds by color and plant into blocks. The offspring of each group are more likely to be like the group (in some cases)... That means if I cross a green Hopi kernel with an other green, I'll have an almost full green ear ? (Yes I had a few green Hopi kernels last year probably due to an intercrossing with Oaxaca green). > The stripes are due to "transposons"
Transposons are a kind of "genetical bug" that modify the color of aleurone. This year I did a block of transposoned kernels to intercross these bugs and see what it gives. Another point about kernel colors. Blue is a powerful dominant color so it's better to discard blue or purple kernels from color crossing tests to allow the expression of other pigments. Anyway blue kernels will show up if you use other "unpure" kernel colors. White shows the absence of pigment. I would say that the most difficult thing with color crossing is to keep full intense and bright colors (blue, red, pink, green, white, yellow) as my first test gave a lot of grey, brownish, unshiny kernels
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 25, 2013 18:18:15 GMT -5
In my experiance it is also a good idea to avoid red or chinmaked from a cross unless red or chinmarked is what you are looking for (this also apllies to the other pericarp colorations, like the pinks brown and purples). Becuse it is maternal tissue; red has a tendency to get closer to an "all or nothing" effect; some kernels will show stronger red, some weaker, but all the kernels on the cob will have the potential for red in thier future. the reason I think it is best to discard it is that strong pericarp colors have a tendency to "mask" the kernel color (especially if the pericarp color is so deep it's functionally opaque), so that you either have to peel the pericarp off the kerenls before you plant them (doable, but it does damage them a little) or more or less blindly guess. Also most kernel colors get UGLY under a hevy red. White and yellow stay red, but pink becomes brown, the rest of the colors basically black. There are a few combinations that can look nice like the one I used to have I called "Salamander" (orange red pericarp, white kernels with light sharp blue stippling) but they are few and far between.
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Post by Andre on Jun 25, 2013 18:41:22 GMT -5
There are a few combinations that can look nice like the one I used to have I called "Salamander" (orange red pericarp, white kernels with light sharp blue stippling) but they are few and far between. Would love to see a picture of this one !
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 25, 2013 19:02:38 GMT -5
There are a few combinations that can look nice like the one I used to have I called "Salamander" (orange red pericarp, white kernels with light sharp blue stippling) but they are few and far between. Would love to see a picture of this one ! Would love to provide such a picture, but it never made it past the first kernel planting stage (squirrels). Plus getting an all stippled (or even mostly stippled) cob is hard; you usually wind up with at least 3/4 of the kernels (more often all but maybe 4-5%) "selfing" back to one or the other partent color (base color or color of spots) so the odds of it getting finshed would have been low in any case
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