052 GENETICS OF FLORAL LONGEVITY IN PETUNIA
in HortScienceOrnamental plant breeding has focused almost exclusively on floral prolificacy rather than floral longevity. The importance of floral longevity is obvious in any ornamental crop grown primarily for floral display. This study was undertaken to determine the genetic basis of floral longevity in an important ornamental crop, petunia.
Four parental lines representing the extremes for floral longevity were used to generate 6 F1 families which were selfed to generate F2 families and backcrossed to create 12 backcross families. Generation means analysis was utilizied to determine estimates of additive. dominance, and epistatic genetic variance for floral longevity in petunia.
