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ARS researchers are charting mango's origins and
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Tracing Florida Mangoes' Family Tree
By Alfredo
Flores
April 9, 2008 A traditional crop in India and
Southeast Asia for centuries, as well as in tropical regions of Central and
South America, mangoes are also grown today in Florida, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Over the past dozen years, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have played a huge role in
the introduction and subsequent development of a unique Florida group of
mangoes.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief research agency.
At the helm of mango genetic research at the
ARS Subtropical
Horticulture Research Station in Miami, Fla., is geneticist
Raymond
Schnell, who has thoroughly reviewed the mango cultivars held there. Since
1980, the station has been the clonal repository within the
National Plant Germplasm System
bearing primary responsibility for collecting and preserving mango and other
subtropical crop species.
Mango cultivars are classified based on the type of embryo that develops
from the seed. Monoembryonic cultivars produce a single shoot, while
polyembryonic types germinate multiple shoots. The early mango introductions to
Florida were primarily from the West Indies and India. Although cultivars from
the West Indies flowered and set fruit well under Florida conditions, they had
a poor flavor.
On the other hand, the early Indian mango cultivars were fine-flavored, but
they flowered and set fruit poorly in south Florida. So hybridization efforts
have been aimed at creating cultivars that embody desirable traits of both
Indian cultivars (primarily monoembryonic) and Southeast Asian cultivars
(primarily polyembryonic) in selections suitable for production under Florida's
subtropical conditions.
DNA extraction and analysis performed on the leaf tissue have led to
findings suggesting that Florida mango cultivar types are more closely related
to Indian than to Southeast Asian types. Interestingly, the Florida types were
not found to be genetically more diverse than either of the originating
parental groups.
The Florida mangoes are unique, and a subset of them has proven to have an
unusually high level of production stability and environmental adaptability.
Among these productive, adaptable mango varieties are "Keitt,"
"Tommy Atkins," "Haden," "Parvin" and
"Irwin," all of which produce dependably over a range of
environmental conditions.
Read
more about the research in the April 2008 issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.