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| Heterosis makes a difference in seed size! |
It has been only a month since we last wrote on heterosis in Jatropha breeding. However, we had not seen then, what we have seen now…
We have harvested a handfull of seeds from the intraspecific hybrid exhibiting by far the strongest heterosis effects in leave size and height. And we were up for a real surprise.
We had recently seen 2 scientific reports on heterosis trials with Jatropha in South East Asia mentioning maximum positive heterosis in seed weight of up to 25%. We therefore really had not expected to see our highest 100-seed weight so far. Extrapolated from 20 harvested seeds it is slightly above 110g. Seed size can be compared very well in the picture above with control (small seeds on the right) being a typical average size Jatropha seed at a 100-seed weight of 56g.
