Multicellular living organisms and unmodified parts thereof and – Method of using a plant or plant part in a breeding process... – Method of breeding maize
Reexamination Certificate
1998-10-08
2002-02-05
Benzion, Gary (Department: 1638)
Multicellular living organisms and unmodified parts thereof and
Method of using a plant or plant part in a breeding process...
Method of breeding maize
C800S320100, C800S260000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06344599
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a method of producing an open pollinated hybrid and to open pollinated hybrids of corn and sunflowers.
The publications and other materials used herein to illuminate the background of the invention or provide additional details respecting the practice, are incorporated by reference, and for convenience are respectively grouped in the appended List of References.
Domestic (cultivated) corn is primarily a creation of prehistoric Native North American breeders. Selection was carried out on corn producing a vast array of varieties and types of corn. Maturities ranged from 60 days to maturity to 160 days to maturity. Grain hardness ranged from soft floury to hard flinty. Grain color ranged from deep purple to pale white with all the shades in between. Since corn is a cross pollinated plant type, the Native American breeders made selections of material plant types with no control of the pollen (male) parent. This type of selection is called half sib selection. Thus, corn was developed as an open pollinated crop, spread across North America, with numerous local varieties adapted to local conditions. All of the commercially grown corn, world wide, is derived from this North American germplasm pool.
The European colonists that came to the New World (North America) used the Native American open-pollinated varieties as they found them and continued the method of half sib selection to improve yield and agronomic qualities. This method of breeding continued into the 20th Century with the local varieties across North America representing separate gene pools based on the original Native American open pollinated varieties. The type of grain preferred by colonial breeders was a medium textured seed of yellow color with a flinty outer endosperm enclosing an inner soft floury endosperm. As drydown progresses the soft endosperm collapses and an indentation is formed on the crown of the corn kernel, thus the name “yellow dent” was applied to this type of corn grain. Yellow dent corn is the predominant version of the grain that is used worldwide for food, feed and fuel.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, genetic researchers began to self-pollinate corn. Selfing used bags over the ears and the silks to control the flow of pollen from the tassel to the silks of individual plants. Successive generations of self pollinating (selfing) resulted in a continuing loss of vigor with plants becoming weaker and less able to produce seed in quantity. To those skilled in the art this phenomena is known as “inbreeding depression”. It is also well known to those skilled in the art that when weak unrelated inbreds were crossed, the resultant progeny (seed) gave rise to plants that were many times more vigorous and higher yielding than the parents. This phenomena is known as “hybrid vigor”; the progeny seed is known as hybrid (F
1
) seed.
While it was possible to produce hybrid vigor with reference to weak inbred lines, it was not initially apparent when inbreds were derived from one of the accepted commercial open pollinated varieties and the standard for yield and vigor was such a commercial variety. However after much trial and error research it was discovered that when inbreds were selected from a range of the adapted open pollinated varieties from widely divergent geographic areas that hybrids were produced that yielded far more than the open pollinated varietal parents with a far more uniform population of plants. It became clear that certain varieties when crossed together yielded commercial grade hybrid vigor, but most did not. The special populations (open pollinated varieties) that produced hybrid vigor when combined were called heterotic groups. The major heterotic groups are listed in Table 1:
TABLE 1
Variety
Origin
Lancaster Surecrops
(C103)
Connecticut
Canadian Morden
(CMV3)
Canada
Early Butler
(CO109)
New York
High Yield
(HY)
Illinois
Ohio 43
(OH43)
Ohio
Reid Yellow Dent
(SSS)
Iowa
Wisconsin 153
(W153)
Wisconsin
Wilson Farm Reid 9
(WF9)
Indiana
As an example, it was found that when inbreds derived from Reid Yellow Dent were crossed with inbreds from Lancaster Surecrop produced hybrids that far out-yielded any commercial open pollinated variety. From this process/product the hybrid seed corn industry began. The first hybrids became available in the 1930s and by the late 1950s virtually all of the open pollinated corn varieties had been replaced by hybrids.
The actual mechanism of hybrid vigor is still poorly understood, with the result that genetic improvement has been confined to breeding and selection within the heterotic groups. Thus one can improve the stalk strength and yield of C103 but the basic genetic background of C103 must be maintained so that the hybrid relationship with Stiff Stalk Synthetic (SSS) is maintained. This results in a cumbersome breeding process in which improved lines must always be evaluated in reference to specific heterotic mates. For example an improved line from C103 can be produced but if it fails to yield hybrid vigor with SSS it is discarded. Therefore, hybrid breeding is an expensive process.
The actual production of hybrid seed is also an expensive process. In a production field two inbred parents are planted. One is a female plant upon which the hybrid seed will be produced. This plant must be detasselled prior to pollination or genetically male sterilized. The second plant is a male pollen parent used to pollinate the female plant. The seed of this male plant is not harvested for hybrid seed. Thus to produce hybrid seed it is necessary to use weak yielding inbreds as seed producing parents, and to use non-seed producing parents as pollinators. Based on a variety of environmental conditions, the male and female plants may fall out of synchronization with silking and pollination timing resulting in reduced or non-existent seed production. For all the above reasons, hybrid seed production is expensive and somewhat complicated, with the result that hybrid seed production and the resultant hybrid seed is unavailable to many subsistence farmers in developing countries that need it most.
Like corn, sunflower is a crop that was developed by the Native Americans before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers. It was used as a nutritious oily food crop often complementing corn in their diets. It had an additional dimension in that certain selected varieties produced purple, colorant bearing hulls with high levels of anthocyanin pigment. These hulls were used in a boiling water type treatment to color the clothes and blankets of the people. Colors ranged from red to blue depending on the treatment of the hull material (anthocyanins are color sensitive to pH values with low pH levels yielding red colors and higher pH levels yielding blues). The sunflower seed of commerce is an achene, which is a dry fruit with the hard woody hull representing ovary tissue with the kernel representing the ovule (seed). The Native Americans would consume the sunflower as whole achenes (often roasted) or as shelled kernels. The hulls of the sunflower can be any color with black, white, black/white striped and purple being most common. The sunflower traveled from the New World and found its way to Europe where it found special acceptance as a cool climate oil seed crop in Russia. In the first half of the 20th Century under V.S. Pustovoit, a number of widely adapted open pollinated (OP) black hulled oil seed varieties (not hybrids) with oil content greater then 40% were developed. The old Native American land varieties had oil content of about 30%. As with corn, all breeding work on sunflower prior to the development of hybrids was accomplished with half sib selection techniques both in the New World and Russia. Russian OP varieties were introduced into the Northern Great Plains (Minn, N.Dak., S.Dak.) in the 1960s. The OP variety Peredovik was especially successful and widely grown. However, the disuniformity of this OP variety and the lack of stalk strength made the American farmers desire an improved varietal type and ho
Barkley Seed, Inc.
Benzion Gary
LandOfFree
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