Thursday, December 15, 2011

Raspberry Seed Morphology

Each year I have an undergraduate student work in my program. Usually they help with crossing in the spring and do another small project of their own. Last year, Lauren M. took on a project looking very closely at raspberry seed size and shape. The inspiration for this project was some work done at the USDA-ARS Germplasm Repository and Oregon State University. In 2010, they published a manual on a way to identify blackberry cultivars by looking at thier seed size and shape. Here is a link to that work:
http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/16304/em9002.pdf;jsessionid=4D8C98C55C3539681A5FF1FA7446EFFE?sequence=1

Lauren spent many hours cleaning and photographing seeds of 16 different raspberry and blackberry cultivars. Here are a couple examples of what she found. Once you start looking closely, you can see how different two varieties can look. We are using this as one way to catalog our breeding material.

Thanks Lauren!

3 comments:

  1. Gina:
    Would be interesting to do this digitally as well to create a library that way. I did a little with pecans a few years ago, but most of the work has been done with turfgrass (http://www.sroseed.com/resources/pdfs/articles/Batchanaly_digitalimages.pdf). Can differentiate by color as well. Interesting work!
    Eric Stafne

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  2. Gina,

    Just wondering where we can find the results of Lauren's work ? the photographing seeds of 16 different raspberry and blackberry cultivars.
    thanks

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  3. No, there is an article by Wada et al, 2010 a group at the USDA-ARS.The article that has the how to and lots of pictures at:
    http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/53581500/Reed/Wadaetal2010handbook.pdf

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