Yes, tracking down the original varieties that those traits came from sounds like a great way to go.
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In my own garden, I would intentionally cull gynoecious plants. Philosophically, they seem defective to me. I cull carrots with CMS, even though the trait was selected from a naturally occurring plant.
How does someone maintain a gynoecious population if non-gynoecious genes are introduced?
Oh, I was about to quote someone but that really took some work - the original link for this:
Led to a different post, not this one (unless I made a mistake? Unless Iām wrong, maybe the parts of these two posts have now been taken out and combined into this one?) Anyway @bramblewoodhill in her OP in that post had specifically written:
Hopefully now my āorange cauliflowerā statements make sense, and hopefully this makes clear what the upside would be - she wanted a specific trait that was only available in a CMS population.
I find it interesting that no-one has given any reasoning yet against my own proposal. Say or example you grew with the first generation of orange cauliflower F1s and they were 5% male fertile, then you can gather pollen from them, and then incinerate all of those plants (or just eat them!) if you want! And just use the pollen from them for crossing, which so far as I can understand from what @Joseph_Lofthouse said, pose zero threat. Or, like I said above, if they are 100% male sterile and you need to cross them first to make the next gen less than 100% male sterile in order to get pollen, then just do so in isolation so you donāt get stray seeds. Maybe harvest the seeds long enough before they ripen then ripen them indoors in a closed room or something if youāre afraid of stray seeds getting into your other projects. Surely this canāt be that hard to make safe, can it?
From what I understood, @Joseph_Lofthouse said the CMS is trasnmitted only by the females. via the cytoplasm or cell organelles in it. So, if the orange colour of the cauliflower is a trait transmitted by the DNA in the nucleus, which I assume it is, then that advantageous trait @bramblewoodhill was wanting should be heritable from the pollen. No?
Huh! I didnāt realize you were against gynoeciousness, too! Fair enough. That seems very consistent. 
I will cull anything with androeciousness unless thereās no way to get hermaphroditic plants, but Iām perfectly happy to grow gynoecious plants in the same population as hermaphroditic ones, especially in a species (like pepo squash) that tends to offer up ten times more male flowers than female ones. That imbalance feels broken to me already. I prefer a roughly even ratio of male to female.
I donāt mind if the gynoecious population turns into a hermaphroditic one after a generation or so ā in fact, Iād mildly prefer them to be mostly gynoecious (rather than entirely gynoceious) eventually, anyway. All the better for crossing.
Actually, most pepo squashes that say theyāre gynoecious are only mostly gynoecious already ā they often have a few male flowers, just not very many. Something like 10% of the flowers are male (instead of 90%, which seems to be more typical).
So I figure adding those varieties into my landrace is likely to eventually result in a more optimal gender ratio. The ideal would be if all my plants end up 50/50, but I can live with it if half my plants are 90/10 and half are 10/90.
@Justin Iāve been trying, without success, to find out what percentage, if any, of CMS plants might produce pollen. My guess is extremely low, like 1 in 1000 or more. It relies on a mutation occurring that switches on an override gene. Whether crossing a CMS plant with a non CMS plant increases that likelihood I donāt know.
Given how fiddly it is to hand pollinate brassicas youād have to be really keen to have orange caulies to embark on such a project. If I was really keen and had the space and energy, Iād plant a patch of CMS orange caulies with a single non CMS caulie in the middle. If caulies are self-incompatible and if this one sets seed then bingo, youāve succeeded. Until that happens youād be growing a lot of compost material or chicken feed.
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For the trait Iām interested in (orange cauliflower), the history on it states that it was a sport in a field of white cauliflower, circa the 1970ās. Seeds were saved from it and passed to Cornell to work with. They developed a variety from it. All orange cauliflower varieties are related to that single variety. So, Iām not sure if a non-CMS orange cauliflower variety exists.
Iām more concerned with converting a CMS to a non-CMS variety, rather than keeping the seed separated (which should be fairly easy). My responses below are coming from the breeding angle rather than the storage angle.
If the plants werenāt all pollen sterile then it would seem possible to breed the desired trait in while breeding the CMS out. The issue then becomes a matter of statistics and bed space. How many would need to be planted to get a small # of male fertile and does the gardener have the space to grow that many plants?
For the 100% male sterile scenario, hereās my thought process:
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Year 1 would be crossing a non-CMS variety (pollen donor) to a CMS variety (mother plant). Save seed.
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Year 2 plant F1s. You would likely get 100% CMS. With great luck, you might get 98% CMS; however, I always count on the odds not being in my favor. So, cross in a non-CMS variety again. Save seed.
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Year 3 plant F2s. Since weāre still saving seed from a CMS mother and the genetics are non-Mendelian, our odds for non-CMS offspring are likely still the same.
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Year 4+. Continue as above, hoping to hit on that magic cross to get non-CMS plants.
I imagine itās a bit like the leg feathering genetics in chickens. Itās a polygenetic trait and can be near impossible to get rid of once introduced.
It may be a worthwhile project, but not one that I have the space to work on at this time.
Hi Ray! Yeah me too, I trawled google scholar for a while but with no luck.
Yeah sounds like a good plan. Maybe several times over even! If I were in need of orange cauliflowers Iād probably try that, or maybe even get (or make) one of those cool pollen vacuum cleaner things and go suck on a whole orange patch and then shower it all on one mother plant, and repeat daily 
Just to give you an idea of what I mean - there are professional pollen sucking apparatus, but hereās someone just using a simple hand vacuum to do the job. If the sterility is so high as you suggest Ray, I think using something like this (or lower the voltage if it would be too powerful for brassica flowers), then either hand pollinating; blowing it onto the flowers; or simply dumping it on flowers haphazardly and letting the insects then spread it properly, might greatly increase the chances of fertilisation over just the wind or insects if really so few plants in the patch had good pollen. Just my guess though:
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Yeah seems a fair concern. Would be great if we had the statistics on what percentage sterility! Because if itās ā¦ say 98%, then it should be easy to do, in just one year youād have pollen with around 50~100 plants, and youād never have to plant the CMS ones ever again!
But yeah if bringing even minimal male fertility would take years of breeding then for sure your task is made harder. I have 3 suggestions for that, no idea if any of these options would be useful for you.
- Make a āgo fund meā project to sponsor it, maybe even offer male fertile orange cauliflower seeds to the investors as a share in the outcome!
- Make a community project out of it, so the land required is split over many orange-loving people!
- How about grafting? I have no idea if brassicas can be grafted, but if they can be, then perhaps you could introduce some male fertility by grafting an orange one onto a healthy one. The healthy one I assume will be providing the nucleus material for the male and female sex cells, but the root stock might change the cytoplasm and even maybe some of the cell organelles of the plant itself, and/or the offspring. So perhaps this would be a way to introduce some male fertility either in that very generation, or at least maybe the next via the seeds. I have heard of hereditary changes resulting from grafts in trees, so perhaps this could help here.
Oh and I just thought, may as well google this to check myself, and yes seems we can graft brassicas, for example:
@Justin, well ya gone and done it, pushed me down another rabbit hole of researching. If I understand CMS correctly, and Iām not sure I do, then there had to be a naturally occurring instance of orange cauliflower. Turns out according to this paper Cornell Chronical June 2007 there was.
According to this paper a naturally occurring orange mutation was discovered in a field in Canada about forty years ago and ended up at Cornell University. A quick search shows a number of orange cauliflowers currently on the market, all F1s. Iām guessing they all originated from the work with that mutant, but I donāt know.
Now Iām even more confused than I was. Did they do the CMS creation procedure that Joseph described to that mutant to obtain a CMS orange cauliflower? If so, it doesnāt make sense because it is now male sterile and needs pollination from a presumably, non-orange variety making the orange color subject to the whims of mendelian genetics. And since all offspring is also male sterile (assuming that is correct) the orange is more and more diluted, for lack of a better word with every generation.
OR did they create both the orange CMS and another line of orange through natural means? That would allow the natural orange line to serve as the father for the CMS line indefinitely and at the same time prevent anyone else from being able to breed with orange cauliflower because only the CMS line is sold.
Now if, for the sake of argument, the CMS is not 100% and a person is able to get a cross, how much orange would show up in the F1, the F2 and so on. Also, and I didnāt go this far down the rabbit hole, are the seeds or the process under any kind of patent or PVP?
Especially since I not sure I know what Iām talking about anyway; Iām climbing back out of this particular hole and leaving any further explanations or speculation to Joesph, if he wants to chime in.
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@bramblewoodhill, the original orange cauliflower huntress, mentioned this above and seems she was unable to locate any non-CMS ones so far:
So bear in mind I am totally new to all this. But from what I understand (please someone correct me if Iām wrong!), the evil companies deliberately create CMS varieties, then they breed that with a breeding partner that has a specific gene to counter that specific type of CMS (there are multiple kinds of CMS) - I think they call this a āCMS fertility restoration systemā. So from these two parents they can produce evil F1 seeds that they can sell but people cannot use to make new seeds from. So they then keep their 2 parent lines locked up, which is probably why you canāt find non-CMS orange cauliflower.
And to me, this means that using their tools, like hand pollination, special breeding, all those rather unnatural artificial kind of methods, to get that beautiful pleasing trait out and rescue it from the CMS demonisation, represents an act of liberation and democratisation. Hurray! 
So far as I understand (again please correct me if I am wrong), once you have the trait, youāre basically home free. You can burn all the CMS plants, breed those seeds and back cross it to make the trait stable. As for patent, I donāt know but so far as I understand, in some places anyway, once you have crossed it with other things, itās not patented. Unless it was a GMO trait, but it wasnāt. Iām way less sure of this patent thing though so donāt rely on what I just said!
That is the typical way that CMS is used - Both a CMS variety, and an open pollinated variety are maintained. Varieties remain proprietary via trade secrets, and a terminator gene, instead of via PVP.
Once you get CMS into a species, you donāt have to start from scratch, just swamp the CMS variety with pollen from the desired pollen donor, generation after generation, until the original nuclear genetics are too dilute to affect anything.
I think that if any pollen at all was being produced by the CMS hybrid, that someone would have made a publicly available open pollinated variety by now. Itās been on the market for decades.
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@UnicornEmily Iām not opposed to gynoeciousness. I donāt love it, therefore, I discourage it in my garden. Itās part of my strategy of doing what I love, and not fussing about what I donāt.
I suspect that the gynoecious trait dominates, since itās caused by having several copies of a particular gene. Therefore, if I wanted to maintain the trait, I would plant like 90% of my pepo squash seeds that were collected from gynoecious parents each year, and 10% from parents that produced more pollen. In that way, the overall population could be maintained in a gynoecious state, while maintaining some pollen donors. Genetic diversity, and selecting for valued traits.
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I like that idea! That sounds excellent.
Oh, okay, cool, that makes sense! There are plenty of things I donāt mind, but I donāt love, so I donāt spend my time and energy on them. There are also plenty of things I like, but donāt have enough time and space to work on, so Iām delighted when somebody else tries it and I can see how it goes for them. 
I think @Joseph_Lofthouse made a list somewhere of crops to potentially avoid for CMS versus crops which are safe. I had a search and canāt find it, even on the male sterility page on the course. I think this would be really useful info to have easily accessible. If someone can point it out to me that would be great but also could be cool to think of a way to have the most vital info (like this) easily accessible, maybe in some kind of wiki or something?
Itās in the lesson āEasy to Hardā in Chapter 1. Here is a sheet I adapted from Josephās tables. Iāve been doing a little reading after seeing references to tomatoes and eggplants hybrids being bred with CMS. And how they are so close to achieving it with squash.
There arenāt any rules for disclosure of breeding practices, these seed companies seem secretive about genetics and practices. Iād love to hear from people who know more about this than me.
Is CMS being successfully achieved in more species on an ongoing basis, and if so, would we even know about it?
You know, we should probably all remember that industrial plant breeding keeps progressing down its chosen path, too. Itās wise to keep abreast of whatever theyāre trying to do, so that we can be aware of anything that may affect our goals and plans in the future.
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It has occurred to me that ātheyā might get around to doing that with other crops. Unless we spend our lives keeping up with all the scientific publications, I doubt we would know about it. Maybe not even then as ātheyā might keep it as trade secrets, so as not to give anything away to the competing ātheyā.
There are workarounds, one being to discontinue use of any hybrids at all and only include heirlooms in our initial mixes. And two, learn to recognize normal vs abnormal flowers. Possible problem with number two is what if ātheyā discover or engineer some other method that does not have a tell-tell visible aspect?
I know CMS in corn is documented. In the early 1970ās when a blight hit the US corn crop, nearly all of the F1s planted then had the same CMS line as the mother even if different fathers were used. I donāt remember all the details but if you Google something like 1970s US corn blight, Iām sure it will come up. As I recall that particular line of CMS corn was dropped because it could reverse itself due to environmental conditions and I suppose by necessity, had to reverse itself in the F1 or how else would it make corn? I have a book about it somewhere, probably in the attic in the shed.
I have no idea if there are other CMS corn lines or if or how they are being used but none of the F1 corns Iāve grown showed any signs of it.
Ah thanks Julia - I didnāt see this as it seems the default is to get notifications if a person clicks to āreplyā to a comment one makes, but if you just write a general reply, one is not notified (I guess unless one has created the OP). That is the chart I was looking for!
Here is a picture of a flower from the commercial Belstar F1 hybrid. It looks pretty normal to me; what do you think? (It would be interesting if people posted pictures of flowers from commercial F1 hybrids, so that we could figure out just how prevalent CMS really is, and which hybrids are usable for our purposes.)
