Restoring Promiscous Pollination To Tomatoes

[imgrimmer]

Domestic x habrochaites on the left it is an F3 (Can it be or is it a misplaced domestic seedling?)
Crosses 2

[gilbert]

I'm going to plant all the wild x domestic plants together, and hopefully save a big bunch of seed; and next year, I think I'll focus on selecting for strong germination and quick growth. I hate having to baby things. My sole remaining Neandermato plant is threatening to keel over, and is probably the smallest plant in the frame. I've already planted out most of my standard tomatoes.

[imgrimmer]

May 7, 2018 23:19:40 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

F2 flower (domestic X S pennellii)

Joseph Lofthouse
The flowers of my F2 domestic X S pennellii looks exactly like yours. I have a F(?) Fern x habrochaites hybrid with closed anthers but an excerted stigma.
I am curious about the fruits. I want to cross them with my own late blight tolerant strains.
Some of my own strains had excerted stigmas in the last seasons I tried to pick the fruits of these plants but this year all flowers are "industrial" style again. It might be depending on climate or other factors. But it is definately not stable. These hybrids might help.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

william, awesome. Im jealous. I had about 4 or 5 fruits on my f2 Pennellii, but since this year was so haphazard and i had so much going on that i lost them when planting it outside. These were from hand pollinations with galapagense and cherry tomato pollen, some might have been with my oil and cut stigmas method that was mentioned in the bean interspecies thread. I have not observed pollen in the f2 Pennellii plant i had, but it set fruits when i tried hand pollinating A LOT of flowers.

P.s. i would like to get some Big Hill seed at some point. I think i have 3 seeds if i search for them.

[imgrimmer]

Aug 2, 2018 10:09:26 GMT -5 William said:

Last year the variety Blue Ambrosia from J and L gardens was the most exserted in my garden. So I saved all the seed and replanted.

Last year I found a few plants with excerted stigma, but offspring is like common type again. It might be due to other reasons than genetic?

Aug 2, 2018 10:09:26 GMT -5 William said:

I have a suspicion that earlier plants, extremely robust plants, smaller fruits, red fruits, and larger fruits are more likely to be hybrids

When I started I picked always the fleshiest fruits ( like the beeftype) of every plants just because I thought it will push selection towards the beeftype. It turns out it was only a wish and not reality of course as I now know. But it turns out that I had a lot of hybrids that way. Fleshy fruits on salad type plants comes from crippled flowers often with a somehow exposed stigma. Might be the reason for that.
My tomatoes changed colour, shape and disease resitance from year to year. So I am nearly sure it is the best way to find hybrids on strains with closed flowers.

My F2 penellii is also promising. Amongst the wild and half wild tomatoes I seem to be getting extremely modest pollination so far this year. Lots of aborted flowers. Though I do have a few plants with fruit.

I checked the F2 penellii plants again. Every plant is different in flower style. One is like in the picture from Joseph but there are others with more closed connected anthers but stigma is always excerted. Fruit set isn`t very good. My own plants have already more fruits
[/quote]

Tomatoes doing much better with the drought this season than other plants, like e.g. peppers. I didn`t know that.

[imgrimmer]

Aug 2, 2018 17:17:03 GMT -5 William said:

My comment about factors that might show up was intended to be specific to Blue Ambrosia

you are right, I didn`t read it carefully.


Tonight I was thinking about why my F2 pennellii hybrids set fruits so sparely. Could it be that it is missing vectors like bees for pollination? Autogamous plants always pollinate themself, so no adaptation towards special vectors is necessary.
If so breeding towards flowers with allogamous pollination, needs to breed for attraction of vectors as well.

[imgrimmer]

I am not often in my garden at the moment, so I have no idea about pollinators. But I saw bees going only for domestic tomatoes with closed flowers here in my yard. Bees shake the flower for pollen. I am sure they are not after nectar (honey). Lose anthers might be difficult to collect pollen.... just a thought.

Anyway I think it would be a good idea for me to select for exposed stigma and closed anthers. Which would allow crosspollination and still selfpollination. Less fruits due to pollinator problems would be a draw back.

I was thinking about doing 3 possible controlled crossings.

1st crossing of different F2 penelli hybrids.
  as a gene reservoir for further crossings
2nd F2 penellii hybrid x (F3 domestic x habrochaites).
  just to find more different flower styles and getting genetically closer to domestic tomatoes and for fun.
3rd F2 penellii hybrid x domestic.
  different crosses are possible, I`ve got 2 USDA accessions one for PH 2 and one for Ph 3 genes, my own
  late blight tolerant strain and Mountain Magic F2 and F3 for late blight resistency too

Could be too elaborated for me, so  I don`t know if I can do it properly, but I`ll try.

[imgrimmer]

Aug 3, 2018 18:48:47 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

ironically these were extra plants that I was going to toss but did not have the heart to cast them off at the time, so I stuck them in the ground

this is exactly how I found my blight tolerant plants

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Yes, exerted stigmas is both genetically and environmentally influenced. Some are more prone to it than others.

Yes, i think i read a paper or something that said larger fruits were more likely to be hybrids. Joseph Lofthouse might remember more about this than i do.

My F2 pennellii did not appear to have pollen when buzzed with an electric toothbrush. I think some genetic sterility issue is going on, but i think they are receptive to pollen from other plants.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Thanks for the recent grow reports and commentary.

So far, I have collected about 40 fruits from the F2 [domestic X pennellii] plants. All fruits collected to date have been green-fruited perhaps leaning towards yellowish. I am getting enough fruits that I eat some of them. One of them tasted more like a plum than a tomato. Yay!!!! I might actually find a tomato that I can stand to eat.

I inter-planted about 4 [domestic X pennellii] plants with 4 [domestic X habrochaites] plants, and early in the season I attempted manual cross pollinations among and between them by collecting pollen into a black spoon. They seemed to shed plenty of pollen when the flowers were at the right age. Now the bumblebees and digger bees are active in the patch, so I have stopped attempting manual pollinations. I am collecting plenty of fruits from the patch. I screened the plants for early flowering and exerted stigmas while they were still growing in the greenhouse, so I was about to put the best of the best into the kitchen garden where I can pay more attention to them.

I planted hundreds of the inter-species hybrids into a field. About 15% of the plants appear to be self-incompatible, and to have exerted stigmas. I am allowing natural cross pollination in those fields. The self-incompatibility genes are dominant, so there appears to be a lot of self-incompatibility going on. There is a lot of flower drop without setting fruit -- for example, if a plant has self-incompatibility and a stigma that is inside the anther cone, then it doesn't get pollinated. Also, if a plant is self-compatible, with an exerted stigma, but the anther cone is pressed tightly against they style, then pollen can't get out to pollinate it, and if the flower isn't attractive to pollinators, then it might not get pollinated. The pollinators are really clever... They will often fly right past plants with tightly closed anthers, without bothering to land in order to check them out.

I planted the F2 hybrids about 8" apart, which allowed me to put hundreds of plants into a single long row. I'm whining about that now, cause the plants have grown huge, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. Oh well.

There is a formula to estimate fruit size for F1 hybrid tomatoes. I don't remember it exactly, but mid-way between the sizes of the parents, but much closer to the size of the smaller parent. So far, the largest fruits I have collected from the inter-species hybrids are about 1.3 inches in diameter. That's still a huge improvement from the .3 to .5 inch diameters of the wild species. When I was doing hybrids among domestic tomatoes, it seemed like about 10% of the F2 generation had fruit-size approximately the same as the larger-fruited parent.

I'm growing a patch of S corneliomulleri. The plants tend towards pea sized fruits. One plant has fruits that are twice the diameter of any other plant. Woot! Something to watch.

I'm also growing a patch of plants that I call BC1 which may be F2 of [S habrochaites X [Domestic X S habrochaites]]. I'll use fruit size/color as an indication that a backcross was successful.

There is so much going on with the self-incompatible, beautifully-promiscuous tomato project, that I hardly know what to write about. It sure is nice to see so many bumblebees of so many species. And other pollinator species as well. I was in the garden of a collaborator to inspect 2 tomato plants from this project that she is growing for me. There are too few flowers on 2 plants to attract bumblebees, so they aren't getting pollinated.

I did a lot of inter-planting of the different wild species and interspecies hybrids, to try to facilitate crossing between them. My tomato patches are a huge jumble right now!!!!

Thanks again for working on this project with me, and for inspiring me with your ideas and successes, and for sharing germplasm.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The F2 [domestic X S pennellii] plants are highly variable in vigor. They all have pennellii type leaves.

[walt]

2 things your post reminded me of, from my professional tomato breeding days.

Size of the fruit on an F1 hybrid tends to be the geometric mean of the size of the 2 parents.  Geometric mean is the square root of one multiplied by the other.  Geometric mean is always smaller than the arithmetic mean.
arithmetic mean = (a+b)/2
geometric mean = square root of (a x b)

The other thing I remembered was having bright red fingernail polish on my left thumbnail during crossing season.  Tomato pollen shows up against the bright red.  My wife hated me wearing red fingernail polish, but it was only for a few weeks, and only one thumbnail.  I thought that was a reasonable compromise.  She didn't. 

I'm so glad this Promiscous pollination program is going so well.  Other than S. esculentum x S. pimpinellifolium, which is not even an interspecific cross, depending on your choice of taxonomist, I only got one seedling of S. esculentum x S. pennelli, and it died at the 2 leaf stage.  Well, S. esculentum x S. pimpinellifolium was getting me the results I needed at the time, heat and drought tolerance.

[steev]

Would she have preferred puce?

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Aug 6, 2018 1:00:24 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Thanks for the recent grow reports and commentary.

So far, I have collected about 40 fruits from the F2 [domestic X pennellii] plants. All fruits collected to date have been green-fruited perhaps leaning towards yellowish. I am getting enough fruits that I eat some of them. One of them tasted more like a plum than a tomato. Yay!!!! I might actually find a tomato that I can stand to eat.

I attempted manual cross pollinations among and between them by collecting pollen into a black spoon. They seemed to shed plenty of pollen when the flowers were at the right age.

I planted the F2 hybrids about 8" apart, which allowed me to put hundreds of plants into a single long row. I'm whining about that now, cause the plants have grown huge, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. Oh well.


I'm growing a patch of S corneliomulleri. The plants tend towards pea sized fruits. One plant has fruits that are twice the diameter of any other plant. Woot! Something to watch.

There is so much going on with the self-incompatible, beautifully-promiscuous tomato project, that I hardly know what to write about. It sure is nice to see so many bumblebees of so many species. And other pollinator species as well. I was in the garden of a collaborator to inspect 2 tomato plants from this project that she is growing for me. There are too few flowers on 2 plants to attract bumblebees, so they aren't getting pollinated.

I did a lot of inter-planting of the different wild species and interspecies hybrids, to try to facilitate crossing between them. My tomato patches are a huge jumble right now!!!!

Thanks again for working on this project with me, and for inspiring me with your ideas and successes, and for sharing germplasm.

That plum tasting tomato sounds interesting. I partly am wanting to doubt you, but i also know pennellii had some of the most unusual flavor compounds, so something crazy good could come from that species! Very interesting!

Haha i was wondering if you were going to plant them too close... they are monsters! Partial desert adaption and domestic growth genes are a good combo.

I love this project. I dream daily of tomatoes that attract bees in droves and produce good fruit!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Aug 7, 2018 13:51:57 GMT -5 keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) said:

That plum tasting tomato sounds interesting.

I tasted a tomato today from the habrochaites clade. It tasted like a domestic tomato, only magnified about 10X. Even though I don't like tomatoes, I usually don't spit them out once they are in my mouth. That one was a spitter!!!!