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- Author or Editor: Dong H. Lee x
- HortScience x
Somatic hybridization through protoplast fusion has proven to be a valuable technique in citrus for producing unique allotetraploid breeding parents that combine elite diploid selections. Many citrus somatic hybrids are now flowering and being used in interploid crosses to generate triploid hybrids that produce seedless fruit, a primary objective of citrus breeding programs. Most of the early somatic hybrids produced for mandarin improvement combined sweet oranges with mandarins, because the performance of sweet oranges in tissue/protoplast culture generally exceeds that of most mandarin selections. However, a high percentage of triploid progeny from interploid crosses using sweet orange + mandarin somatic hybrids as the tetraploid parent produce fruit that are difficult to peel. We report nine new allotetraploid somatic hybrids and five new autotetraploids from somatic fusion experiments involving easy-peel mandarin parents. These tetraploids can be used in interploid crosses to increase the percentage of seedless triploid progeny producing easy-to-peel fruit. Ploidy level of the new tetraploids was determined by flow cytometry and their genetic origin by expressed sequence tag–simple sequence repeat marker analysis.