Project Number: 1230-21000-051-04
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Sep 25, 2006
End Date: Sep 24, 2010

Objective:
The primary objective of this work is to develop techniques, methods, and plant germplasm that will lead to sterile or highly infertile cultivars of invasive or potentially invasive nursery crops.

Approach:
Two different approaches will be used to generate seedless plants. One method will focus on creating tetraploid plants using mitotic inhibitors. These tetraploids will then be hybridized with diploids to create (sterile) triploids. The second method will use biotechnology or genetic engineering to test several different genes and promoters that could impede normal seed development. For both approaches, in-vitro plant material will primarily be used as the starting material.