Wheat Anther Culture: Agronomic Performance of Doubled Haploid Lines and the Release of a New Variety “Florin”

Abstract

The production of haploid plants from hybrids, followed by chromosome doubling, provides wheat breeders with a means of accelerating the process of true breeding line development. The interest of doubled haploid wheat plants has been understood since their discovery (Gaines and Aase 1926). Nevertheless, a useful technique for producing haploids started at the beginning of the 1970’s with anther culture (Chu et al. 1973; Ouyang et al. 1973; Picard and de Buyser 1973; Wang et al. 1973). Since that time, other techniques have been developed in order to produce haploid wheat plants: the bulbosum technique used for some particular genotypes (Barclay 1975), the Salmon method (Kobayashi and Tsunewaki 1978; Tsunewaki et al. 1984) and the wheat × maize crosses (Laurie and Bennet 1988). Limited numbers of haploids can also be produced using irradiated pollen (Natarajan and Swaminathan 1958; Snape et al. 1983) and unpollinated ovary culture (Zhu and Wu 1979; Yan et al. 1979).