Browsing by Subject "haploidia"

The objective of this study was to develop functional method for producing doupled-haploid plants for faba bean. Microspore culture is an advanced method to produce doubled-haploids and it is based on the totipotent nature of plant cells, since even a microspore, which is an immature pollen cell with haploid genome, can develop into a plant. This plant is either haploid or doupled haploid depending on whether there has been chromosome doubling or not and because the chromosomes either do not have pairs or the pairs are pure copies of each other, the plant is completely homozygous. Doubled haploids are already used in breeding programs with several crops such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape. Faba bean is an important legume for food, feed and crop rotation. Together with other legumes it has the potential to replace soybean imports entirely in Finland. Faba bean yield stability and anti-nutritional factors restrain its use and active breeding is required to improve the crop. In Finland, where pea and faba bean are the only grain legumes actively cultivated, the breeding of faba bean has been recently reactivated and its objectives are earliness, higher yield, protein content and improved quality factors. Big bottle neck in faba bean breeding is the creation of pure homozygote lines because the partial cross-breeding in the species sets restrains for the procedure. In this study promising pea and chick pea protocols that were developed in 2009 and an efficient rapeseed protocol were applied with faba bean. The interaction of various stress treatments and two different induction media with five genotypes of faba bean on microspore culture were analysed. Pro-embryos and cell divisions were observed from the cultures. Heat shock was the most effective stress treatment. Effects of density and induction medium were high and cultivar’s low tannin content seemed to impact positively to induction efficiency. These results suggest that for faba bean microspore culture is as suitable method as anther culture is and that there is hope to produce doubled-haploid faba beans in the future.